Elastic Computing


Elastic Compute Service


Overview

Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides fast memory and the latest Intel CPUs to help you achieve faster results with low latency to power your cloud applications. Alibaba Cloud ECS instances come also with Anti-DDoS protection to safeguard your data and applications from DDoS and Trojan attacks.

You can deploy ECS instances with just a few clicks from the clean and easy-to-use console, and scale capacity up or down based on your business and web application’s real-time demands. You therefore only pay for the resources you use, and avoid the need to provision expensive IT infrastructure and hire large network teams.

 


Customer Testimonials

Philips

“Alibaba Cloud provides outstanding local technical service capabilities. More importantly, it qualifies the Philips global vendors’ specifications for finance, legal compliance, risk control and security. Alibaba Cloud has also provided substantial assistance in terms of tech support and which has enabled us to expand our business.”

 

Teridion

"We can now offer on average a 20x performance improvement over the regular Internet for China users, and without Alibaba Cloud’s presence in the different metropolitan areas, this would not be possible. The Alibaba Cloud footprint also offers a more stable infrastructure between China and other regions that we’ve seen with other cloud providers. As the Alibaba Cloud global footprint grows, customers in additional regions will also benefit."

 

blogmint

“With a network of more than 20,000 active bloggers, Blogmint relies on Alibaba Cloud's reliability and scalability to cope with more than 100% growth in traffic each month. Being able to choose network tiers and having the ability to scale in real-time during campaigns is one of the main reasons we chose Alibaba Cloud. This coupled with their reliability, high performance and pricing were the key reasons for our decision to use Alibaba Cloud services.”


Benefits

Elastic

  • Can boot or release up to 100 ECS cloud servers quickly.

  • Scales capacity automatically depending on real-time requirements to improve overall performance.

  • Instantly upgrades network bandwidth.

 

Fully Automated Platform

  • One-click deployment for all resources.

  • The easy-to-use console allows convenient access, management and control of your resources anytime, anywhere.

  • Extends automatic data migration.

 

Stable

  • Provides a highly reliable environment with service availability of 99.95%.

  • Backup and restore data when needed.

  • Generates system performance alerts regularly.

 

Secure

  • Solid DDoS defense system and Network Security Group (NSG) protection.

  • Multi-user isolation gives additional layers of security.

  • Advanced defense against password cracking.

 

High Quality Network

  • Provides 12000 Random IOPS & 300 MB/s ephemeral SSD volume.

  • Provides access to Multi-line BGP backbone network.

  • Cost-effective and highly efficient.


Processing Power

Built for Success

Built using the Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v3 processor family, Alibaba Cloud ECS delivers record-breaking performance that gives you the power and capacity to fuel your best business ideas and handle data and transaction intensive applications.

 

Product Details

Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is a core service that enables you to launch new instances immediately to meet with real-time demand, along with a variety of basic components such as operating systems, memory, CPU, storage, IPs and images.

The clean and simple Alibaba Cloud user console allows you to load applications with different operating systems and manage network access rights and permissions. Within the user console you can also access the latest storage features, including auto snapshots, which is perfect for testing new tasks or operating systems as it allows you to make a quick copy and restore later.


Features

Computing

Elastic

ECS offers a variety of configurable CPU, memory, data disk and bandwidth variations allowing you to tailor each Instance to your specific needs. Bandwidth can be upgraded instantly so you experience zero lag time. CPU and memory upgrades take less than 5 minutes to upgrade.

Offers 99.95% service availability and ensures stable business operations.

I/O-Optimized instances

The underlying software and hardware of I/O-optimized instances are augmented to power SSD CloudDisks ensuring a much higher IOPS. For non-I/O-optimized instances, mounted SSD CloudDisks can process up to 1,000 IOPS.

Global Data Centers

Alibaba Cloud has 15 deployment regions across the world, including China, USA, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East.

Alibaba Cloud’s China data centers offer multi-line BGP backbone network lines, covering all of China’s provinces and municipalities. This ensures stable and high speed network access.

The Hong Kong and Singapore regions provide effective network access to the Hong Kong, Asia-Pacific, Southeast Asia, Japan and South Korea regions.

The Alibaba Cloud United States region is located in Silicon Valley. With BGP lines, this region provides coverage across the U.S, South America and Europe through multiple backbone operator networks.

 

Storage

Supports Three Types of Data Storage Disks

Users can attach a data block storage for their ECS instances to achieve sustainable and reliable storage pattern of data blocks. Data blocks mounted to ECS instances can be formatted to create file systems on them for persistent data storage. Considering various demands of I/O performances under different scenarios, we offer three types of data block storage services that can be used both in combination or separately:

 

 

 

Note: You can purchase data disks separately from the console after an ECS instance has been initialized and attached to it. Ultra Cloud Disk is available in the Singapore region only.

Automatic/Custom Backups

Snapshots are used to backup and recover your ECS CloudDisks.

Automatic snapshot policies can be customized for ECS system disks or data through the console. Alternatively, snapshots can be manually created through the console or OpenAPI. Snapshot rollback enables quick data recovery.

 

Management

Easy Management

With complete control over your ECS instances, you can remotely solve system problems and perform operations through connected terminals, similar to managing on-premise local servers.

This allows for restarting your servers, resetting login passwords and isolating networks through the console, API and command lines.

 

Network

Public IP addresses: Public IP addresses provide the connection between Instances and the Internet, or between Instances and Alibaba Cloud services.

Private IP addresses: Private IP addresses provide the connection between different ECS instances over the Intranet, or between ECS instances and other cloud services such as Server Load Balancers, Object Storage Service (OSS), and Relational Database Service (RDS). Communication traffic through private IP addresses between instances in the same region is free of charge.

Note: IP addresses of different products in different regions are not interconnected over the Intranet.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Classic Network

Alibaba Cloud offers a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or a Classic Network for you to choose from depending on your network plan.

  • Classic Network: The IP addresses of Classic Networks are uniformly distributed, featuring easy configurations. In Classic Networks, users are allowed to manage network accesses of Alibaba Cloud ECS with the help of security groups to achieve isolation.

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Isolated network environment allows you to have full control of your own virtual networks, including resource access management through security groups, and customization of IP address ranges, network segments, route tables and gateways. You can also establish a customized network infrastructure comprising of a VPC and legacy data center/s. These are connected by a dedicated line/VPN to achieve smooth migration of applications to the cloud.

 

Security

Exceptional Security & Protection

Anti-DDoS: Provides protection against up to 5GB traffic of DDoS attacks, SYN flood, UDP flood, ICMP flood, ACK flood and other common DDoS attacks.

Server Security: Provides protection against brute force attacks, password cracking, Trojans and other forms of security threats. ECS also offers remote login reminders, and repairs high-risk vulnerabilities.

Advanced Security: For advanced network and server security requirements, we provide specialized security services such as Anti-DDoS and Cloud Monitor.

 

Advanced Monitoring Functionalities

Site Monitoring: Offers statistics, monitoring and alarm options to track availability and response time of HTTP, Ping, DNS, TCP, UDP, SMTP, POP and FTP services.

CloudsService Monitoring: Provides advanced monitoring and alarm options to efficiently monitor all your resources concurrently. Alarm and Contact Management: Supports multiple alarm modes including SMS messages, emails and interface callbacks.

Alarm and contact management: Supports multiple alarm modes including SMS messages, emails and interface callbacks. It also provides uniform and bulk messaging services on alarm rules and alarm contacts.

 

Images

Faster Deployment with Images

Image is the operating environment template for ECS instances which generally contain the operating system and preloaded software. ECS instances can be replaced by system disks of ECS instances with images for faster deployment.

Images are accessible by three ways:

  • Public Images: Provides multiple released versions for Windows and Linux.

  • Cloud Marketplace: Offers a variety of server operating systems, tools and software images provided by third-party Independent Software Venders ISVs.

  • Image Sharing: Offers user defined images shared by owners with other users through the ECS console or ECS API which can be used further for creating cloud servers or ECS instances and replacing system disks.