Cloud Server on Alibaba Cloud

An Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is a cloud computing service with flexible processing capacity. Flexible here means that the computing resources can be adjusted instantaneously based on demand.

Provisioning a customized ECS instance

It is relatively simple to create an ECS instance on Alibaba. All it takes is 3 steps:

1. Register an Alibaba account and add a verified payment method.

2. Configure an ECS according to one’s needs.

On the top navbar, select the burger menu to open the left pane and press “Elastic Compute Service” and then select “Instances”.

Here one can select the Region (I am working in Germany – Frakfurt).

Now “Create Instance”.

There are two types of Billing Methods (Subscription or Pay-As-You-Go) and 4 Levels of Configuration (Basic Configurations, Networking, System Configurations and Grouping).

3. Submit an instance and launch. It will be available within 3 minutes.

Managing an ECS instance

There are various operations one can do and all of they are found on the console, accessed from anywhere: Remote Login (Login into the instance through the console from any computer), Remote Restart (restart an instance through the console), Tune Performance (increase CPU, memory, and network bandwidth), Expand Storage (expand the size of existing disks or add new disks), Location Adjustment (set where the instance is located).

Vocabulary

• Instance: Virtual computing environment, including CPU, memory and other fundamental computing components.

• Region & Zone: City where Alibaba Cloud provides a cloud computing service.

• Disk: The physical data center disk, within a region. This is used to store system and user data. It can be scaled up at any time.

• Disk image: This image is the template of a runtime environment for ECS instance, including OS pre-installed software and related configurations.

• VPC: Virtual network in one’s own logically isolated area within the Alibaba Cloud. It provides a level of isolation and block’s outer network communications.

• Security group: Isolated different security domains inside a VPC.