Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides scalable and reliable compute capacity in the cloud. With ECS, you no longer have to invest precious time and money to purchase, set up, and manage your IT infrastructure, so you can focus on developing and deploying your applications.

Expansive instance options

ECS provides a broad and deep selection of instances to fit different use cases.
  • State-of-the-art computing architecture

    ECS instances run on the x86 and ARM architectures, which are sufficient to cover almost all types of workloads.

  • Diversified instance types

    ECS provides a wide selection of instance types and gives you the flexibility to size your compute resources to match capacity needs at the lowest cost. Instance types comprise varying combinations of compute, memory, and storage capacity, allowing you to choose an appropriate mix of resources for your applications. General-purpose, network-enhanced, storage-enhanced, memory-optimized, security-enhanced, big data, high clock speed, GPU-accelerated, and FPGA-accelerated instance types are available with different options for CPU, memory, and network resources to provide exceptional cost performance for general-purpose computing, heterogeneous computing, and high performance computing scenarios.

  • Multiple deployment models

    Aside from the typical virtual machine deployment model, ECS also offers dedicated physical resources in the form of ECS bare metal instances and dedicated hosts. ECS bare metal instances provide direct access to the processor and memory resources without virtualization overheads. You can deploy containerized applications on top of ECS bare metal instances in cases where performance is key. Dedicated hosts are physical servers that are entirely dedicated to you. You can create and run ECS instances on dedicated hosts on demand, gaining additional visibility and control over how instances are placed on physical servers.

Unlimited scalability

Alibaba Cloud's global network allows you to deploy ECS instances in multiple locations all around the world. Equipped with abundant state-of-the-art resources, thousands of ECS instances can be provisioned securely and reliably within a few minutes. You can use ECS to create as many or as few instances as you need and scale in or out in response to changes in requirements or popularity of your workloads.
  • Vertical scaling

    You can scale up or down ECS instances in compute capacity, storage capacity, or network bandwidth as your requirements change.

  • Horizontal scaling

    Most business sees different volumes of traffic at different times of the day. In cases such as these, you can use ECS with Auto Scaling to scale in or out resources based on a predetermined schedule or in response to traffic fluctuations to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost.

Reliability you can trust

  • Service reliability

    ECS operates with a single-instance availability of 99.975% and a cross-zone multi-instance availability of 99.995%.

  • Data durability

    Storage attached to ECS instances makes use of a multi-replica mechanism to provide a data durability of 99.9999999% (nine 9's).

  • Availability and disaster tolerance

    ECS provides a host of availability and reliability features such as failover, snapshots, and automatic alerting to ensure service availability and data recovery even when one or more instances fail.

Designed for convenience

  • Intuitive interface

    ECS provides a user-friendly, web-based console, which you can use to start, stop, configure, and modify ECS instances in the same way you would with a physical machine.

  • Push-button deployment

    ECS images are preconfigured with an ever-growing list of operating systems and software. Images allow you to deploy multiple instances with the same configurations quickly and easily.

  • Rich management and migration tools

    Alibaba Cloud provides rich management and governance tools such as Terraform, Operation Orchestration Service (OOS), and Resource Orchestration Service (ROS). ECS can also work with Server Migration Center (SMC) to facilitate migration of your business to the cloud.

Comprehensive security capabilities

  • Diversified security features

    Alibaba Cloud provides a host of security services and features that meet international standards and requirements for data security. These services include Anti-DDoS Origin Basic, port intrusion detection, vulnerability scanning, and trojan scanning to protect your applications hosted in ECS.

  • Hardware encryption

    ECS supports Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM), confidential computing based on Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), and vSGX and provides comprehensive hardware encryption capabilities.

Cost optimization

  • Multiple billing methods

    ECS provides the following purchasing options for instances to help you optimize costs at every stage of your business: subscription instances, pay-as-you-go instances, and preemptible instances.

  • Flexible pricing models

    ECS also provides modular pricing models in the form of savings plans and reserved instances to help you further reduce costs on ECS resources. Savings plans are a flexible pricing model that offers lower prices than pay-as-you-go pricing, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in USD per hour) for a one- or three-year period. After you purchase savings plans, the lower prices are applied for resources that match the configurations of the savings plans. Reserved instances give you the option to reserve capacity for a period of time and in return receive significant discounts compared to pay-as-you-go Instance pricing. Reserved instances can be applied to pay-as-you-go instances that match the attributes of the reserved instances.

  • Mix-and-match billing methods

    You can mix and match billing methods of different ECS resources to achieve the perfect blend of performance and costs tailored towards your use case.