Get started with ECS - Elastic Compute Service - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

ECS basics

ECS is an IaaS offering of Alibaba Cloud that provides high-performance, reliable, and scalable computing services in the cloud. ECS eliminates the need to invest in IT hardware up front. ECS allows you to efficiently deploy applications and scale up and down based on your business requirements.

ECS

Select an ECS instance type

ECS instance families

A variety of instance types to meet various business scenarios

Overview of instance families

Best practice for purchasing ECS instances

Select appropriate ECS instance types based on your business requirements

Best practices for instance type selection

Billing methods for ECS

You can select an appropriate billing method based on the ECS resource types that you use. Pay-as-you-go and subscription are the two main billing methods. You can also choose a cost-effective billing method such as preemptible instances and savings plans based on your business requirements.

Note

For more information, see Billing overview.
You can change the billing method based on your business requirements. For more information, see Change the billing method.

Billing method	Description
Pay-as-you-go	A billing method that allows you to use ECS resources and pay for them afterwards. You are charged based on the resources that you actually used. Pay-as-you-go is applicable to applications or services that experience traffic spikes, such as temporary scaling or interim testing.
Subscription	A billing method that allows you to use ECS resources only after you pay for them. You are charged based on the subscription duration in the order. Subscription is applicable to services that run for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, such as web services. You must pay for subscription resources before you can use them.
Preemptible Instance	Preemptible instances are on-demand instances that use spare computing resources and offer some discounts. Prices of preemptible instances fluctuate based on changes in supply and demand. Preemptible instances are suitable for stateless scenarios such as scalable web services, image rendering, big data analytics, and large-scale parallel computing.
Reserved instances	Reserved instances are independently billed coupons that can be used to offset the bills of pay-as-you-go instances. Reserved instances must be used together with pay-as-you-go instances.
Savings plans	A savings plan is a discount plan that allows you to obtain pay-as-you-go billing discounts in exchange for a commitment to use a consistent amount of resources (measured in USD per hour) over a one- or three-year period. General-purpose savings plans: are suitable for business with stable resource usage, such as system upgrades or cluster deployment, where instances may be created and released from time to time but the overall usage is relatively stable. ECS compute savings plans: are suitable for business with stable resource usage, such as system upgrades or cluster deployment, where instances may be created and released from time to time, but the overall usage is relatively stable. ECS elastic savings plans: are suitable for business with periodic resource usage changes, such as livestreaming or food delivery services. Resource consumption bursts only in a specific period of time.

Quick start with ECS

ECS console (express version)

Create and manage an ECS instance in the ECS console (express version)

If you need only one or two ECS instances, you can create a subscription instance in the ECS console based on this topic.

ECS console (detailed version)

Get started with Linux instances
Get started with Windows instances

Purchase an ECS instance and deploy a web environment on the instance by using the ECS console.

CLI

Create and manage an ECS instance by using Alibaba Cloud CLI

If you are used to running CLI commands to manage an ECS instance, you can create a subscription instance based on this topic.

SDK

Create and manage an ECS instance by using SDKs

If you want to use an SDK to customize an ECS instance, you can create a subscription instance based on this topic.

Example on how to create and connect to an ECS instance

The following video demonstrates how to create and connect to an ECS instance in the ECS console.

Common operations on ECS

ECS provides various features that you can use to perform operations. The following table describes the common operations that can be performed on ECS.

Operation	References
Purchase ECS instances	Create an instance on the Custom Launch tab
Batch configure sequential names or hostnames for multiple instances	Batch configure sequential names or hostnames for multiple instances
Upgrade to a larger instance type with more vCPUs and more memory	Upgrade the instance types of subscription instances
Reset the logon password of an ECS instance	Reset the logon password of an instance
Release ECS instances	Release an instance
Connect to a Windows instance	Connect to a Windows instance by using a password or key Connect to a Windows instance by using a username and password
Connect to a Linux instance	Connect to a Linux instance by using a password or key Connect to a Linux instance by using an SSH key pair Connect to a Linux instance by using a username and password
Resize data disks by extending their capacity	Overview
Replace the image or the operating system of an instance	Replace the operating system of an instance
Upload files and data from an on-premises computer to ECS instances	Use Cloud Assistant to upload a file to ECS instances
Back up ECS data for data restoration	Create a snapshot for a disk Create a snapshot-consistent group Create an automatic snapshot policy
Create an image from an ECS instance and use the image to create more ECS instances	Create a custom image from a snapshot. Create a custom image from an instance.
Allow access on ports of ECS instances	Add a security group rule
Associate an elastic IP address (EIP) with an ECS instance to access the Internet	Associate one or more EIPs with an instance
Categorize and manage ECS resources	Create or add a tag Resource groups
View the monitoring data of an instance including the CPU utilization, memory usage, network bandwidth, and disk usage	View the monitoring information of an ECS instance
Build a website on an ECS instance	Summary of website building methods

Developer tools

If you are familiar with network service protocols and one or more programming languages, we recommend that you call ECS API operations to manage your cloud resources and develop applications. For more information, see API overview.

You can use OpenAPI to dynamically generate SDK code based on your needs.

Feedback and suggestions

If you have questions and suggestions related to ECS, you can use the following methods to provide feedback and obtain technical support:

Pre-sales support: If you want to purchase Alibaba Cloud services, call the Alibaba Cloud pre-sales hotline or contact your Alibaba Cloud account manager for consultation. For more information, see the Pre-sales support section in the "Contact us" topic.
After-sales support: If you require help with your Alibaba Cloud services, call the Alibaba Cloud after-sales hotline or submit a ticket. For more information, see the After-sales support section in the "Contact us" topic.
Feedback on documentation: If you encounter issues in documentation, such as link errors, content errors, and API operation errors, click Feedback in the floating menu on the right side of the page or copy the error content to provide feedback.