Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) is an automated deployment service that is designed by Alibaba Cloud based on the concept of infrastructure as code (IaC) and is used to simplify management of cloud computing resources. You can create templates to define the required Alibaba Cloud resources such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and ApsaraDB RDS instances, and dependency relationships between the resources. The ROS engine automatically creates and configures all resources in a stack based on a template to implement automated deployment and O&M. ROS provides Terraform-based management that allows you to use Terraform templates in the ROS console to automatically deploy and manage resources. For more information, see Overview.
Benefits
ROS can help you manage a large number of cloud resources in an efficient and cost-effective manner based on security compliance and business requirements.
ROS allows you to use templates to deploy multiple resources in a few steps. You do not need to manually create resources.
ROS provides a large number of sample templates and solutions, based on which you can deploy advanced solutions in complicated business scenarios.
ROS supports the elasticity capacity that allows you to deploy and release multiple cloud resources at a time based on your business requirements. This helps you reduce costs.
ROS incorporates the IaC concept and integrates the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) approaches into template management. This ensures the compliance of resources.
Compared with other IaC tools, Alibaba Cloud ROS has the following features:
ROS integrates Alibaba Cloud services and resources and supports more than 100 services and more than 500 resources. This helps you manage resources in Alibaba Cloud in a convenient manner.
ROS provides ROS templates that are text files written in JSON or YAML format.
Terraform is available as a managed service in ROS. You can create Terraform templates and stacks in ROS to orchestrate resources of Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure.
ROS provides GUIs that allow you to orchestrate and manage resources directly in the ROS console.
ROS provides different scenario templates that you can use to deploy resources in a few steps.
ROS is free of charge.
For more information, see Benefits and Common scenarios.
How ROS works
After you create a template, ROS can use the template to create stacks and automatically deploy resources. The following figure shows how ROS works.
If you want to change resources in a stack, you can update the stack. For more information, see Update a stack.
Before you change your resources, you can create a change set to preview the changes that you want to apply to the resources. Then, you can execute the change set to apply the changes to your stack. For more information, see Overview.
Features
Feature | Description |
Free management | ROS provides a fully managed and serverless solution that supports the automatic execution of tasks. You can define Alibaba Cloud resources, describe dependency relationships between the resources, and configure parameters in a template. Then, you can use the template to create a stack to manage the resources. ROS provides free management on Terraform for you. You can create Terraform templates and stacks in ROS to orchestrate resources of Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft Azure. Terraform is compatible with the ROS API. After you create a Terraform template, you can call ROS API operations to manage resources. |
Cross-account and cross-region deployment | You can use a ROS template to implement automated deployment within multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts across regions. You can also use a ROS template to deploy development, test, and production environments. You can specify different parameters in the template based on the requirements of the environments. For example, you can use a ROS template to deploy 2 ECS instances in the test environment and 20 ECS instances in the production environment. |
Standardized deployment | ROS allows you to implement repeated deployment and save deployment costs by standardizing deployment environments, minimizing differences between environments, and incorporating environment configurations into templates. |
Visual presentation of results | The automated deployment feature of ROS allows you to view the deployment results of resources by using the ROS console or by calling specific ROS API operations. You do not need to perform complex operations to check the deployment process. |
Drift detection | You can use the drift detection feature to identify changes that are made outside of ROS to resources. This way, you can take corrective measures to resynchronize resources with their template definitions. |
Access control | ROS is integrated with Resource Access Management (RAM) to help you manage accounts and permissions in a centralized manner. ROS is also integrated with ActionTrail to help you review all O&M operations, including the operations on ROS. |