By Kelvin Galabuzi
As a new Alibaba Cloud user, you can access a free trial of 50+ offers worth up to $1,700 (or $8,500.) This will allow you to learn about and experience a range of the products and services available across the Alibaba Cloud platform.
If you sign up for a free trial as an individual, you will get $1,700 worth of offers. However, if you are a registered company, you can choose the Enterprise free trial, submit the basic info to pass the enterprise real-name registration verification, and start a free trial worth $8,500!
This tutorial explains how to set up your account and use your free trial.
Before we start this trial, you must also comply with the following Terms and Conditions to access your Free Trial:
Once you have created an Alibaba Cloud account, your free trial can be used to access products from the free trial campaign page.
The free trial for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is valid for up to 12 months, and the credits for trialing other Pay-As-You-Go products are valid for 60 days.
Once you've registered, individuals and enterprises can try up to 50+ trial products across a range of services, including Elastic Computing, Storage, Database, Application Service, and more.
You can also put your credit towards getting started on Alibaba Cloud's always free products:
You can get started with your free trial in three simple steps:
First, let's look at how to sign up for a free account, add a payment method, and start using Alibaba Cloud's extensive range of products and services.
1. Visit Alibaba Cloud's free trial website and click the Free Account button on the top right hand side of the page:
2. Select your account type:
There are two account types:
3. Enter your email address and choose a password. Please make the password as long and complex as possible. Anyone that gains access to your Alibaba Cloud account will have full access to all of your server resources, web hosting packages, firewall configurations, etc.; choosing a strong password is necessary.
After you click Sign Up, go to the next page to choose your country. Please select the correct country (typically where you are located where your credit card will be billed), otherwise, you will have problems when it comes to entering and validating your payment details. If you choose the wrong country, you must start again and set up a new account, as this setting cannot be changed.
4. Next, you need to verify your email address or phone number. Click the Send button. This will result in a numerical code being sent to you in an email (or a text/SMS message.) Open your email (or message app on your phone) and look for the message. It should arrive within a minute or so.
When the code arrives, type it into the box. Afterward, you will be redirected to the next page.
5. Now that your email account is verified, you need to enter some additional information, such as your name, address, city, state, and postal code. You also need to verify your phone number.
After you have entered your phone number, click Verify. When you do this, a second window will pop up. Click the Send button on that window, and a numeric code will be sent to your phone as a text/SMS message. Enter the code into the box, and your mobile phone number will be marked as verified. Next, click Submit.
If you are registering an Enterprise account, you will also need to enter your company name, address, and contact information to access the Enterprise Free Trial benefits. If you have already joined our Individual Free Trial, you are eligible for the Enterprise Free Trial.
6. Next, you need to enter a payment method to ensure that your Alibaba Cloud services continue to work when your free trial expires.
You can bind any of the following payment methods:
After entering your credit card details, the card needs to be verified and validated. Alibaba Cloud will charge a small amount (less than $1, which will be returned to your account later) to your card, and the transaction record will include a 6-digit code. You need to provide either the code or the charged amount to verify your card. You need to contact your credit card company (by phone or online) or wait until your next printed statement arrives to find this information.
Note: You will pay standard service rates for extra usage if you exceed the dollar value or allotted time during the free trial period. A full list of pricing options for all Alibaba Cloud's products is available on the Pricing page.
Now that you have set up your new Alibaba Cloud account, let's look at how to begin using the extensive range of products and services. During this free trial, more than 35 Alibaba Cloud products are available for you to try, along with more than 20 always free products and services.
Note: You can ONLY access the free trial offer by selecting your desired product through the free trial page. In addition, some free trial products may only be available in a specific free trial type (Individual or Enterprise.)
Go to the free trial website to get started. Now, let's look at how you can try one of Alibaba Cloud's core products, Elastic Compute Service (ECS). ECS is an online computing service that offers elastic and secure virtual cloud servers to cater to all your cloud hosting needs.
ECS has a simpler and more efficient management mode than physical servers. You can create instances, change the operating system, and add or release any number of ECS instances at any time to fit your business needs. An instance is the core component of ECS and is the operating entity offered by Alibaba Cloud. Other resources, such as disks, images, and snapshots, can only be used in conjunction with an ECS instance.
With the free trial, SMEs and individuals can add T6 burstable instances into their cloud migration plans without any cost commitments. T6 ECS instances are perfect for web application servers, development or testing environments, lightweight applications, and microservices. In addition, T6 instances are more cost-effective than their predecessor, T5, and can reach up to a bandwidth of 4 Gbit/s.
During your free trial, you can try our Burstable Type t6 Instances free for 12 months.
Here's how you can try out this Alibaba Cloud product for free:
1. Make sure you are logged in to your Alibaba Cloud account and go to the free trial page.
2. Scroll down to the Free Trial Details area and select your target instance:
3. Click Try Now
4. Set your ECS configuration options:
5. When you are happy with your ECS configuration, accept the Terms and Conditions, and click Try Now.
6. Your new instance will be available in the Alibaba Console. Click the Console link in the top-right of your screen to view it:
7. On the main Console screen, click Elastic Compute Service on the left-hand menu:
8. This will pull up the ECS Console, where you will see an overview of your current instances. Click on Instances on the left-hand menu. If required, this is where users can switch the operating system of their free trial. You will be restricted to the operating system you select when you configure the instance (Linux or Windows.)
9. Next, you will see details of your new instance and any existing instances you may have set up:
You can continue to add products and services from the free trial page and view them in your Console:
Next, let's look at which other Alibaba Cloud products and services are available during your free trial.
Products and services are available under the different product categories offered by Alibaba Cloud, such as Elastic Computing, Networking, Database, Storage, and Security.
Note: You will receive dedicated product credits for Pay-As-You-Go products like Server Load Balancer and Table Store, which are deducted automatically when you use the resources. If your usage exceeds the free trial offer, you will be charged the standard rate, but you can stop using the resources if you don't want to get billed.
Let's look at how to view your product credits for Server Load Balancer and other Pay-As-You-Go products:
1. Go to the product information box for Server Load Balancer and click Try Now
2. The following window will appear; click OK.
Your account will be credited with the $15 SLB credit.
3. Go to the Console and click Billing Management on the top right-hand corner to view this credit:
4. Next, click Coupons on the left-hand menu:
5. Here, you can see the details of the coupons for the Pay-As-You-Go services available on your account:
Let's look at the other products and services available as part of your free trial.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Elastic Computing category.
Simple Application Server (SAS) is typically used for stand-alone applications. You can deploy web applications quickly and easily using multiple application stacks, such as LAMP, WordPress, etc. In addition, varying instance types are available, allowing data transfer of up to 1 TB (only for the individual free trial.)
This secure image hosting and management service allows you to create and maintain container images across multiple Alibaba Cloud regions.
The service integrates perfectly with other Alibaba Cloud services facilitating the DevOps process. Moreover, this service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Operation Orchestration Service (OOS) enables you to automate operations and maintenance tasks from different Alibaba Cloud services, such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), etc.
This service achieves operations and management flexibility through automation templates and batch operations performed across all Alibaba regions. In addition, the service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) allows you to automate the deployment of the different cloud services in Alibaba Cloud. It uses templates defined in JSON or YAML formats to deploy Alibaba Cloud services efficiently. This service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Auto Scaling is a flexible orchestration service that scales ECS instances in and out automatically to serve user requests according to the demand. In addition, the service offers other features, such as the elastic self-health feature that detects unhealthy instances and replaces them without any application downtime.
This service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) is a managed Kubernetes service built on the cloud for containerized applications. The service integrates well with other Alibaba Cloud services and provides additional features, such as security and high availability of your Kubernetes applications across multiple Alibaba cloud regions and zones. This service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Function Compute (FC) is an event-driven, serverless computing platform where you can build and deploy your services without managing any infrastructure.
Under the free trial, you can make one million calls and 400,000GB-seconds per month for free. This free offer has no expiration date, and your free monthly quote updates automatically at the beginning of each month.
The following fees are charged at a rate of $0.2/1 million calls, or you can use a duration fee that depends on your network location.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Networking category.
Server Load Balancer (SLB) monitors the health of your servers. Then, it forwards each incoming request to your web application to the server that is best capable of handling it at the time.
Server Load Balancer helps you manage sudden spikes in traffic, minimize response times, and maintain 99.99% availability of your web application.
Server Load Balancer uses instances as its fundamental units and provides metering data for the instance billing cycle. Fees are calculated based on the length of time of load balancer rentals and network traffic.
Under the free trial, you can receive a $15 Server Load Balancer credit for individual free trials and $55 for enterprise free trials that can be redeemed for one Classic Load Balancer instance for 750+ hours.
Alibaba Cloud Global Traffic Manager provides access to the nearest Alibaba Cloud nodes based on the Global DNS architecture. In addition, the service can help you load balance requests to different instances and allow failover to other instances if an instance in a specific region is down. The service is available as a one-month free trial for individual and enterprise free trials.
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a secure, scalable, and flexible cloud networking service that provides the functionality of building isolated networks in Alibaba Cloud, which can also connect to on-premises or other cloud platform networks. The service is always free to use for individual and enterprise frees.
Alibaba Cloud Public DNS is a fast and secure global DNS service that enables recursive lookups of DNS queries across the Internet. This service provides 10 million HTTP-based queries for free on the first day of each month.
Resolutions that use HTTPS, DNS over TLS (DoT), or DNS over HTTPS (DoH) are counted as five HTTP-based resolutions. After you use up the free quota, you are charged $0.0062 per 10,000 HTTP-based resolutions.
This service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is used to deliver content (videos, images, and more) to Internet users using the cloud nodes nearest to them. Alibaba Cloud CDN is a highly stable, scalable, and fast CDN service.
CDN is available as a free trial through a registration process. Once approved, you are eligible for 1TB outbound traffic for three months. This offer is available for individual and enterprise free trials.
Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) is a fast hybrid and global network that facilitates communication between Alibaba Cloud VPC to VPC communication or VPC to on-premises or other networks outside of Alibaba Cloud. This service is available as a free trial for individual and enterprise free trials.
Global Accelerator (GA) is a network acceleration service that provides the capability to deploy applications across multiple regions to enable easy access to the applications featuring high network quality, security, availability, and low latency.
The service is available for one month only for enterprise free trials. Bandwidth plans start from 2-4 Mbps.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Databases category.
ApsaraDB for RDS is an on-demand database service that frees you from the administrative tasks associated with running the MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL servers. There are several different pricing options, but a 1 CPU, 1GB instance (for individuals) and 2CPU, 4GB instance (for enterprises) for MySQL is available to try for one month under the free trial.
ApsaraDB for Redis is an automated and scalable tool to manage data storage shared across multiple processes, applications, or servers. This service is available with standard architecture and classic network for one month (for individuals) or two months (for enterprises.)
ApsaraDB for MongoDB is a secure, reliable, and elastically scalable cloud database service that supports the ReplicaSet and sharding architectures. A 1 Core and 2GB service with 20GB storage is available for one month for individuals. A 2 Core 4GB service with 20GB storage is available for enterprises.
AsparaDB for PolarDB is a cloud relational database service compatible with the MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle database engines. PolarDB is designed for business-critical applications and ensures high performance and auto-scaling to meet the required business standards.
Every Alibaba Cloud free trial includes a free PolarDB instance with 2 cores, 8GB of memory, and up to 50B of storage.
AsparaDB for ClickHouse is a high-performance distributed column-oriented database service used for real-time data analysis. You can apply to receive up to two variations of Aspara for ClickHouse database instances for individual and enterprise free trials.
Data Management Service (DMS) is a cloud service that provides the unified management of multiple Alibaba database services, such as RDS, PolarDB AnalyticDB, etc. DMS allows users to centrally manage the security and user authorization of Alibaba Cloud databases.
The service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Database Autonomy Service (DAS) is an automated database maintenance service that optimizes and repairs Alibaba Cloud databases based on machine learning algorithms, reducing database management complexity.
The service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Storage category.
Object Storage Service (OSS) is a secure object storage service used to store and archive large amounts of files.
Object Storage Service enables access to 100GB of encrypted and secure cloud storage, 50,000 put/post/delete, and 50,000 get/head requests for $5 OSS credit of your balance for individuals. Enterprises can access 500GB storage, 500,000 put/post/delete, and 500,000 get/head requests for $12 OSS credit of your balance.
File Storage NAS is a scalable, reliable network-attached storage that works with EC2 Instances, Containers, and other services that support the storage kind.
You get up to 5GB of NAS File storage for six months (for individuals) and up to 100GB for six months (for enterprises.)
Table Store is an elastic, reliable, managed NoSQL cloud database service. Table Store lets you use 750 hours and 100GB storage on a capacity instance or 50GB storage on a high-performance instance and get 50+ GB of downstream traffic for $19 free trial credit on individual and enterprise free trials.
Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) is a data management service that provides the functionality to backup and archive data for on-premises and Alibaba Cloud services, such as ECS instances and databases.
You will receive up to 100GB of backup data valid for three months for individual and enterprise free trials.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Security category.
Sensitive Data Discovery and Protection (SDDP) detects, classifies, and grades sensitive data. You can use the supported Alibaba Cloud services (such as databases) for individual and enterprise free trials. You will also receive up to 1TB of object storage to use with the service.
Security Center is a unified security management service used to identify, analyze, and notify security threats in real-time. The service is available for one month for individual and enterprise free trials.
You can also use the Security Center free edition for seven days to test the service before opting for the enterprise edition.
In addition to the enterprise and free editions of the Security Center, you can use the basic edition of the Security Center to detect common threats and vulnerabilities. The basic edition is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Anti-DDoS is an intelligent DDOS protection service used to defend against sophisticated DDoS attacks.
You can opt-in for the Anti-DDoS Premium package, which supports traffic of up to 100 Mbps, or you can opt-in for the Anti-DDoS Pro package, which also supports traffic of up to 100Mbps but offers basic protection of 30-100GB. Both packages are available for one month for individual and enterprise free trials.
In addition to the Anti-DDoS Premium and Pro packages, you can try the Anti-DDoS Basic package, which is always free and can be used with multiple Alibaba Cloud services, such as ECS and WAF.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a reliable firewall service used to protect Alibaba Cloud web applications from web application security threats. You can create a Web Application Firewall that is free to use for seven days for individual and enterprise free trials.
Cloud Firewall is the first line of defense towards protecting your resources on Alibaba Cloud. Cloud Firewall creates and manages firewall traffic policies between VPCs and different networks connected to your Alibaba Cloud resources.
You can use the Cloud Firewall free for seven days for individual and enterprise free trials. After that, you need to purchase the Cloud Firewall instance on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Game Shield is a network security solution used to defend against Internet attacks usually found in the game industry, such as TCP CC attacks. The service is available to try for seven days for individual and enterprise free trials.
Content Moderation detects and removes unwanted content found in the text, images, and videos. It achieves this through the utilization of the deep learning technology developed by Alibaba Cloud.
You can scan up to 3000 images a day for free for the first 31 days for individual and enterprise free trials.
Resource and Access Management (RAM) can centrally manage user access to cloud services and resources on Alibaba Cloud. The service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Action Trail monitors all the activity within your Alibaba account and actions on the different services, whether performed from within the console or via API operations. The service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Key Management Service (KMS) is a fully managed cryptographic key management service that allows you to store, manage, and use your keys securely on Alibaba Cloud. You can use the Key Management Service for up to 20,000 free monthly quota requests for individual and enterprise free trials. Any other exceeding requests are charged at $0.08 per 10000 requests (for China) and $0.03 (for overseas.)
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Enterprise Applications and Cloud Communication category.
API Gateway is an API lifecycle management service that publishes and manages APIs. You can have one million free API calls each month for 12 months for individual and enterprise free trials.
Short Message Service (SMS) enables communications between enterprises and customers through promotional messages and one-time password messages (OTP). The service is available for only enterprise free trials, and you will receive 100 SMS.
Alibaba Mail is a fast and secure collaboration solution that provides enterprise mail management. The service is available for individual and enterprise free trials for up to 50 email accounts for one month.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Analytics category.
Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch is based on the open-source Elasticsearch engine and performs data searching and analytics. In addition, the Elasticsearch service allows clusters to scale out to meet growing business needs. Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch is available for individual and enterprise free trials for one month.
DataWorks is a big data platform used for big data development and management. This service is available for individual and enterprise free trials, and the basic edition is always free to use.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Artificial Intelligence category.
Image Search is an intelligent image service that helps users find similar (or identical) images using Alibaba Cloud's built-in machine learning and deep learning capabilities. You can use the service to search for 100,000 images per image query per second for one month for individual and enterprise free trials.
Intelligent Speech Interaction provides the functionality of speech recognition, speech synthesis, and natural language processing that can be used with products built on Alibaba Cloud. This service is available for 2 hours a day for three months for individual and enterprise free trials.
Machine Translation provides the functionality of infusing natural language processing and deep learning technology into your products. You are entitled to 1 million free monthly requests for individual and enterprise free trials.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Container and Middleware category.
Enterprise Distributed Application Service (EDAS) is a PaaS platform that provides various features that support the management, stability, reliability, and deployment of microservices and other applications. You can receive up to 20 instances of the standard edition of the service valid for one month for individual and enterprise free trials.
Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) is a cloud monitoring service that ensures the desired applications performance through various application monitoring tools. The service is available for use for up to 15 days for individual and enterprise free trials.
Application Configuration Management is a fast and reliable central management panel for all your Alibaba Cloud application configurations. This service allows you to add version control to your application configurations and use the built-in security features to ensure that your application secrets are well protected. This service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Message Service is a secure distributed message queuing and notification service used for message transfers between various applications. The service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Cloud Monitor is a flexible, end-to-end, real-time cloud monitoring service for all your Alibaba Cloud resources and applications. The service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
The following section describes the free trial products and services available in the Developer Services category.
The Developer After-Sales Support Plan supports unlimited technical tickets for free with a continuous eight-hour response time maintained per ticket. The service is available for one month for individual and enterprise free trials.
OpenAPI Explorer is an easy-to-use quick search service that allows you to call APIs through their web interface or WebCLI and view the entire process of API calls. This service is free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
Cloud Shell creates or manages Alibaba Cloud resources or services using the command-line interface available in the Alibaba Cloud console via the web browser. Cloud Shell includes a variety of well-known tools (such as Terraform) to help manage different resources. This service is always free to use for individual and enterprise free trials.
That's it! Now that you know how to get started, go to the free trial page and sign up today. We hope you enjoy using Alibaba Cloud and make the most of your free trial!
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