How to Easily Deploy Your Application with Alibaba Cloud Light Space

By Alain Francois

What is Light Space?

Alibaba Cloud Light Space is Alibaba Cloud's lastest cloud hosting program. It offers SMEs, startups and individual developers with our best-selling entry-level cloud hosting products.

You can use it to deploy and manage applications, resolve domain names, implement security management, and perform O&M operations. It uses the computing, storage, and network resources of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) together with Alibaba Cloud Marketplace images and public images.

Reasons to Use Light Space

Light Space is a new service suitable for new users of cloud computing services, individual developers, or small or medium-sized enterprises that want to deploy simple applications on servers. Its benefits include:

Light Space instances are low-cost, starting from $2.5/month to $80/month
Easy-to-use operation experience, delivery within minutes, and rapid deployment
Cloud computing resources are provided in the form of cost-effective plans to deliver robust performance
Operation and Management (O&M) features such as resource monitoring, self-diagnostics, and operation logs
Support for Alibaba Cloud Marketplace images (application images), public images (OS images), and the application image management feature
Industry-standard API that improves ease of use and compatibility
Integration with various Alibaba Cloud Services (Domain name resolution, Firewall, HTTPS access, VPC, and data backup)

Light Space Types

It mainly provides three types of services:

Application Images provides 14 types of application images with different versions for each application, such as WordPress, LAMP, Docker, Plesk, and cPanel images. It allows you to use out-of-the-box applications without uploading or installing applications.

OS Images provides 6 different operating systems with different versions for each OS. No applications are installed, but it allows you to install applications based on your business requirements. OS images are suitable for users familiar with operating systems and application environment configurations

Custom Images allow you to create and use custom images to create multiple simple application servers with the same configurations and share custom images with Alibaba Cloud ECS. This eliminates the need to configure and update multiple servers.

Deploy a Light Space Instance Application

You need an account to use the Light Space or Simple Application Service (SAS) service. If you don't have an account, you can get a coupon to create a new account during the Alibaba Cloud March Mega Sale.

You will land on the homepage of the service. Now, you need to create a new server:

You can create the instance type you need. In our case, we will create an application instance based on WordPress. You can also select the subscription period for more than one month. Note: There is no Pay-As-You-Go offer, but there are monthly and yearly subscription options. Choose your region and select the number of instances at the bottom of the page. Buy the service:

After that, you will be asked to confirm your order. Now, you can return to the SAS homepage. You will see the new instance:

When clicking on the instance, you will be moved to the configuration page where you can have an overview of your instance. If you click on the _pencil logo_, you can rename your instance. You can also see some statistics on CPU usage, RAM, disk, etc.

You can see some technical detail about the instance, including the IP address, the login page, and the database:

You can also see the firewall setting. You can add new rules if required:

You can also bind a domain name if you already possess one on the Alibaba Cloud DNS panel. Go to Domain name on the same left panel and add a domain name: