Cloud Phone is an Alibaba Cloud Workspace service that provides users with virtual phones that run on cloud servers. Cloud Phone aims to migrate mobile computing capabilities to the cloud and improve the management efficiency of large-scale cloud phones by leveraging the technical and business expertise of Alibaba Cloud. Cloud Phone provides a native Android app runtime environment for device-cloud collaboration. Leveraging the in-house Adaptive Streaming Protocol (ASP) and multiple clients, Cloud Phone enables seamless interactive experiences across various devices.
Benefits
Flexible architecture
Cloud Phone is designed by using the Arm architecture, which ensures system stability and isolates resources. The flexible architecture of Cloud Phone allows the separation of computing, storage, networking, and GPU acceleration to support large-scale deployments across multiple regions.
Interactive experience
Cloud Phone provides a high-quality interactive experience by using the ASP protocol. The platform also provides built-in support for Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and H5 clients and various features, such as camera, clipboard, network redirection, and policy control. Cloud Phone supports end-to-end performance monitoring and facilitates SDK secondary development.
Multiple billing modes
If you use Cloud Phone, you must pay for compute resources (such as vCPU and memory), elastic IP addresses (EIPs), NAT gateways. Cloud Phone supports the following billing methods:
Subscription: You must pay for resources based on a specific subscription duration before you can use the resources.
Pay-as-you-go: You can request and release resources on demand. You are charged after you use the resources.
Intra-cloud communication
Cloud Phone supports virtual private cloud (VPC)-based networking. Cloud Phone can communicate with Alibaba Cloud services such as Elastic Desktop Service (EDS) over VPCs, which ensures security, stability, high bandwidth, and low cost.
Diverse management methods
Cloud Phone allows users to manage instances, applications, networks, policies, and other resources in batches in the Alibaba Cloud Management console or by calling APIs.
Data security and reliability
Cloud Phone utilizes Elastic Block Storage (EBS) technology to provide higher data storage reliability than physical phones. All data is stored on the cloud to address the need for non-local storage of government and financial data and provide a more efficient and secure solution for mobile offices.
Scenarios
Cloud mobile gaming
As a cloud-based virtual phone platform, Cloud Phone supports consistently executing mobile game commands while hosting game applications in the cloud. Cloud Phone uses GPU hardware acceleration to enable mobile games to run in the cloud. This enables big mobile games to operate efficiently on low-configuration cloud phones, which widens the audience for these games. Cloud Phone provides cloud gaming infrastructure and industry solutions to help enterprises quickly build cloud gaming business.
Secure mobile offices
Cloud Phone is designed for mobile office scenarios that involve handling sensitive data, such as customer information and technical assets. Transitioning from personal mobile devices to cloud-based mobile devices eliminates the need to install anti-leakage monitoring software. This significantly simplifies the operation process, guarantees network stability, and improves overall performance, which enhances the quality of mobile office experience.
Support for cross-ecosystem mobile applications
Cloud Phone supports the Android environment, which enables new versions of Android apps to be used on any Alibaba Cloud Workspace device without the need to update the Android version. This simplifies the process of migrating and upgrading software for a large user base across different systems. After the Application Mode feature is activated, users are restricted to accessing and using only the specified applications.
Automated efficiency improvement
Cloud Phone supports collaborative interaction among multiple devices, synchronized application notifications, and device redirection. You can use Cloud Phone together with automation tools to allow robots to handle standard repetitive tasks. This way, you can reserve human intervention only for exceptional cases. Cloud Phone also provides standard system environments, control APIs, and messaging channels for automation tools.
Enhanced device capabilities
Cloud Phone runs a massive amount of resources in the cloud to support large-scale inventory and low-specification devices, such as TVs, set-top boxes, cash registers, and tablets, to increase computing power limits and storage space. You need to only ensure the devices can run the Alibaba Cloud Workspace application or SDKs.
Support for large-scale simulation tests
Before launching new applications, enterprises must simulate heavy concurrent access from global users to ensure that their applications are ready for use. For example, gaming companies need to test their systems with a large number of online players to find problems or slowdowns in their gaming networks. Traditional stress testing solutions, such as solutions based on APIs, may fail to detect issues in real-world scenarios. Cloud Phone can quickly deliver large clusters of tens of thousands of cloud phones within 30 minutes. This allows gaming companies to simulate real-world test environments and conduct stress testing on new games to identify possible system risks and performance issues at the earliest opportunity.
Concepts
The following table describes the basic concepts of Cloud Phone and their relationships.
Concept | Description |
Android | Most mobile devices use the Android OS. Cloud Phone is compatible with the Android 12 version. |
Instance group | An instance group is a collection of cloud phones that are purchased together and share the same specifications, image versions, pre-installed apps, resolution, office network, billing method, and validity period. |
Instance | In Cloud Phone, an instance is the smallest unit of computation. You can allocate one or more instances to users. Instances support access from Alibaba Cloud Workspace clients. |
Application | An application refers to pre-installed software on an instance. You can also upload an application in the Cloud Phone console. If you select "Install Application" on the management page of an instance group, the specified application is installed on all instances in the group. You can install multiple applications at the same time. |
ADB | Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is a versatile command-line tool that allows you to communicate with your Android devices. You can install, debug, or manage cloud phones by using ADB. ADB keys are used to prevent unauthorized connections from devices. We recommend that you connect to cloud phones from cloud computers by using ADB. ADB-based connections over an internal network reduce security risks and provide a more stable network and faster speed than ADB-based connections over the Internet. |
User | Cloud Phone and EDS share the same convenience account system. You can manage users in the EDS console and assign cloud phones to the users in the Cloud Phone console. Users who are assigned cloud phones can open their Alibaba Cloud Workspace clients, configure the required information, such as the organization ID (or office network ID), username, and password, and then connect to the cloud phones. |
Terminal | After you purchase and assign cloud phones to users, the users can connect to the cloud phones based on their business requirements from various Alibaba Cloud Workspace terminals, such as Windows or macOS personal computers, iOS or Android mobile devices, and cloud-based browsers. |
Supported regions
Cloud Phone is available in the following regions: China (Hangzhou), China (Shanghai), China (Beijing), China (Shenzhen), and Singapore.