Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is a high-performance, stable, reliable, and scalable IaaS-level service provided by Alibaba Cloud. ECS eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front. You can create as many or as few instances as you need in response to changes in requirements or popularity of your workloads. ECS provides a variety of instance types that suit various business needs and helps boost business growth.
Why ECS?
Diversified computing capabilities: Alibaba Cloud ECS supports the mainstream x86 and Arm architectures and provides various types of instances, including compute-optimized, GPU-accelerated, ECS Bare Metal, and Super Computing Cluster (SCC) instances, from hundreds of instance families to meet the business requirements of customers of different scales and types.
Ease of use: You do not need to build self-managed data centers. Alibaba Cloud can deliver ECS instances in minutes. ECS provides standard APIs, a performance monitoring framework, and a proactive O&M system. ECS supports various O&M capabilities, such as Terraform, CloudOps Orchestration Service (OOS), and Resource Orchestration Service (ROS), to improve usability and applicability.
Cost optimization: ECS provides multiple billing methods such as pay-as-you-go, subscription, and preemptible instances to meet the requirements of different application scenarios. You can also use discount policies such as savings plans and reserved instances, as well as Auto Scaling and Auto Provisioning capabilities to ensure stable computing power and maximize resource cost-efficiency.
Elasticity and flexibility: You can scale up or down ECS instances in compute capacity, storage capacity, or network bandwidth as your requirements change. You can also use Alibaba Cloud Auto Scaling to scale resources as scheduled or against business loads.
Stability and reliability: A single instance reaches an availability of 99.975%, and multiple instances across zones reach an availability of 99.995%. Storage attached to ECS instances makes use of a multi-replica mechanism to provide a data durability of 99.9999999% (nine 9's). ECS provides various availability and reliability features such as snapshots and automatic alerting.
Security: ECS is secured by high-standard data center security and physical infrastructure protection measures. To enhance the operating system security, access security, network security, and application security, ECS provides multiple guarantees such as hardware encryption, virtual firewalls, Resource Access Management (RAM), Anti-DDoS, vulnerability scanning, and data encryption. This comprehensively protects user business in the cloud.
For more information about the benefits and supported scenarios of ECS, see Benefits and Common scenarios.
Service architecture of ECS
ECS provides various features and components, including instances, images, block storage devices, snapshots, and security groups, for use in different networks. The following figure shows the service architecture of ECS. For information about the features and components shown in the following figure, see Terms.
Billing for ECS
In ECS, compute resources (vCPUs and memory), images, block storage devices, public bandwidth, and snapshots are the resources that you need to pay for.
ECS supports multiple billing methods for resources:
Subscription: Subscription instances are resources that you secure for an extended period of time for an upfront payment.
Pay-as-you-go: Pay-as-you-go instances allow you to pay only for the resources that you use without making prior commitments or upfront payments.
Preemptible Instance: Preemptible instances are unused ECS capacity in Alibaba Cloud. You can purchase preemptible instances at steep discounts, but these instances may be reclaimed by Alibaba Cloud with a short notice.
Reserved Instance: Reserved instances are capacity reservations that are offered at a discounted rate. The discounted rate is applied when the attributes of the ECS instance (including instance type, region, and zone) match those of your reserved instances.
Savings Plan: Savings plans are a flexible pricing model that offers lower prices for pay-as-you-go instances. Savings plans can be applied to ECS resources such as compute resources and disks, and offer savings on the pay-as-you-go rate on these resources in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount (measured in USD/hour) within a specific timeframe.
Storage Capacity Unit (SCU): SCUs are resource plans that offer lower prices for pay-as-you-go storage resources. When you purchase SCUs, you make a commitment to use storage resources of a specific type and capacity in exchange for a lower price. SCUs can be applied to Elastic Block Storage (EBS) devices, File Storage NAS file systems, and Object Storage Service (OSS) buckets.
For more information about the billing of ECS resources, see Billing overview and visit the Pricing tab of the Elastic Compute Service product page.
Access ECS
After you create an Alibaba Cloud account, you can log on to Alibaba Cloud and create, use, or release ECS resources by using one of the following methods:
ECS console: a web service page used to manage ECS resources. For information about the operations that you can perform in the ECS console, see Quick reference.
ECS API: A Remote Procedure Call (RPC) API that supports GET and POST requests. For more information, see API overview. You can use the following developer tools or services to call ECS API operations:
OpenAPI Explorer: an Alibaba Cloud service that facilitates API lookup, simplifies the creation of requests, and dynamically generates SDK sample code.
Alibaba Cloud SDK: provides SDKs for a variety of programming languages such as Java, Python, and PHP.
ROS: an Alibaba Cloud service that you can use to automatically create and configure all Alibaba Cloud resources based on templates that you create.
OOS: an Alibaba Cloud automated O&M service that you can use to automatically manage and execute O&M tasks. You can define items such as tasks, task steps, inputs, and outputs in execution templates and use the templates to automate O&M tasks.
Terraform references: an open source tool that can help you version control configuration files or use them to call compute resources of Alibaba Cloud and other platforms that support Terraform.
Alibaba Cloud Client: a client provided by Alibaba Cloud that can be used to query, view, and connect to ECS instances, elastic container instances, simple application servers, and managed instances.
Best practices for ECS
To maximize the benefits of ECS, we recommend that you follow the best practices described in this section.
Region and zone
Alibaba Cloud ECS is available in multiple locations across the world. These locations are classified into regions and zones. Regions are geographical areas in which Alibaba Cloud data centers reside and provide services. Zones are discrete locations within a region with independent power and networking capacities. After an ECS instance is created, its metadata is created, and its region cannot be changed. Metadata is supported only by ECS instances of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) type. You can select a region and zone based on your geographical location, the availability of Alibaba Cloud services, application availability requirements, and whether internal network communication is required. For example, if you want to create an ApsaraDB for RDS instance over an internal network, the RDS instance and the ECS instance must reside in the same region. For more information, see Regions and zones.
High availability
To ensure business consistency and continuity, create snapshots to back up data, deploy critical components of applications across multiple zones, and use deployment sets and Server Load Balancer (SLB) for disaster recovery.
Networking
Alibaba Cloud VPC allows you to deploy ECS instances in a logically isolated virtual networking environment exclusive to your account. You have full control over the network topology of your VPCs, and can assign private IP addresses to your ECS instances in the VPCs. Alibaba Cloud VPC is compatible with all ECS instance types and features, and is useful for isolating applications or interconnecting services that span multiple regions. For more information, see What is a VPC?
Security
Security groups serve as virtual firewalls for your ECS instances, and allow you to control inbound and outbound traffic and configure port listening settings. Security groups are provided at no extra cost to you. For more information about security groups, see Overview.
Alibaba Cloud provides free basic security and attack mitigation services in the form of Anti-DDoS Origin Basic and Alibaba Cloud Security Center Basic. The basic security and attack mitigation services secure applications deployed on your ECS instances. For more information, see Anti-DDoS Origin Basic and Basic security services.
Anti-DDoS Origin Basic provides a DDoS mitigation capacity of up to 5 Gbit/s and is enabled by default. For more advanced DDoS mitigation capabilities, you can opt to purchase an Anti-DDoS Pro or Anti-DDoS Premium instance. For more information, see What is Anti-DDoS Proxy?
Security Center Basic provides ECS instances with basic security services free of charge, such as suspicious logon detection, vulnerability scan, and baseline check. You can upgrade your Security Center to the Anti-virus, Advanced, or Enterprise edition to obtain additional security features and further enhance the security of your ECS instances. For more information, see What is Security Center?