Alibaba Cloud Compute Services
Alibaba Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
Technology
Transition from Xen to KVM since 2014
ECS Bare Metal Instance have a custom Hypervisor with nested virtualization
SLA
Monthly Uptime Percentage to Customer of at least 99.95%
Machine Types
- Selection of instance types (families) optimized to fit different use cases
Up to 208 VCPU & 3,8 TB Memory. - GPU
Up to 8 GPU & 256 GB of GPU Memory
Machine Options
- Dedicated Instances
- Pay as you go – A postpaid method in which you can pay after using the instance. Instance usage is billed on a minute basis, and the billing unit is US$/hour.
- Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (subscription) – A prepaid method that allows you to use an instance only after you make the payment for it. Instance usage is billed on a monthly basis, and the billing unit is USD/month.
- Spot (Preemptible instances) you can set a maximum price per hour to bid for a specified instance type. If your bid is higher than or equal to the current market price, your instance is created and billed according to the current market price. You can hold a preemptible instance without interruption for at least one hour. After one hour, your bid is compared with the market price. When the market price exceeds your bid or the resource stock is insufficient, the instance is automatically released.
- Dedicated Hosts – Dedicated Host (DDH) is a host service that allows a tenant to use dedicated hardware resources based on Alibaba Cloud virtual hosting services. This service enables enterprises to achieve custom deployment, bring your own license (BYOL), and security and regulation compliance. DDH supports multiple types of ECS instances.
Disks (Block & File Devices)
Alibaba Disk Storage
- Cloud disks that can be attached to only one ECS instance in the same zone of the same region.
- System disks: have the same life cycle as the ECS instance to which it is mounted. A system disk is created and released at the same time as the instance. Shared access is not allowed. Up to 500GB.
- Data disks: can be created separately or at the same time as ECS instances. A data disk created with an ECS instance has the same life cycle as the instance, and is created and released along with the instance. Data disks created separately can be released independently or at the same time as the corresponding ECS instances. Shared access is not allowed. Performance-based category; ESSD, SSD, Ultra Cloud Disks and Basic Cloud disks up to 32TB per disk.
- Shared Block Storage is a block-level data storage service with strong concurrency, high performance, and high reliability. It supports concurrent reads from and writes to multiple ECS instances. Shared Block Storage can be mounted to a maximum of 8 ECS instances. SSD and Ultra Cloud Disks up to 32TB per disk.
- Local disks are the disks attached to the physical servers (host machines) on which ECS instances are hosted. They are designed for business scenarios requiring high storage I/O performance. Local disks provide local storage and access for instances, and feature low latency, high random IOPS, high throughput, and cost-effective performance. SSD up to 8x 1,788GB GB and SATA HDD up to 154TB
Alibaba NAS
A storage space designed to store massive amounts of unstructured data that can be accessed by using standard file access protocols , such as the Network File System (NFS) protocol for Linux, and the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol for Windows. You can set permissions to allow different clients to access the same file at the same time. NAS is suitable for business scenarios such as file sharing across departments, non-linear file editing, high-performance computing, and containerization (such as with Docker). Support Petabytes of data
Auto Scaling
Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the volume of your elastic computing resources to meet your changing business needs. Based on the scaling rules that you set, Auto Scaling automatically adds ECS instances as your business needs grow to ensure that you have sufficient computing capabilities. When your business needs fall, Auto Scaling automatically reduces the number of ECS instances to save on costs.
Auto Scaling provides a health check function and automatically monitors the health of ECS instances within scaling groups, so the number of healthy ECS instances in a scaling group does not fall below the minimum value that you set.
Billing Model
- Pay as tou go: Instance usage is billed on a minute basis, and the billing unit is US$/hour.
- Discounts:
- Spot Instances (Preemptible instances). Depending of the bid price; the maximum hourly price you are willing to pay. Greater than 60% (around 80%)
- Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (monthly subscription) up to 60%
- Dedicated Host depending on your legacy SW licenses reutilizations
Other
- Linux & Windows Support
- Public and Custom Image Support
- Snapshot support
- Start & Termination Script
- Elastic IP Addresses
- Cloud migration tool
Container Service, Container Service for Kubernetes & Elastic Container Instance (ECI)
Container Service for Kubernetes provides the high-performance and scalable container application management service, which enables you to manage the lifecycle of enterprise-class containerized applications by using Kubernetes. By simplifying the setup and capability expansion of cluster and integrating with the Alibaba Cloud abilities of virtualization, storage, network, and security, Container Service for Kubernetes makes an ideal running cloud environment for Kubernetes containers with two modes:
- Classic dedicated Kubernetes mode: You can get more fine-grained control over cluster infrastructure and container applications, for example, select the host instance specification and the operating system, specify Kubernetes version, custom Kubernetes attribute switch settings, and more. Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes is responsible for creating the underlying cloud resources for the cluster, upgrading and other automated operations for the cluster. You need to plan, maintain, and upgrade the server cluster. You can add servers to or remove servers from the cluster manually or automatically.
- Serverless Kubernetes mode: You do not need to create the underlying virtualization resource. To launch the application directly, use Kubernetes commands to specify the application container image, CPU and memory requirements as well as external service methods.
- Dedicated Kubernetes cluster
You must create three Master nodes and one or multiple Worker nodes for the cluster. In addition, you need to plan, maintain, and upgrade the cluster as needed. With such a Kubernetes cluster, you can control cluster infrastructures in a more fine-grained manner. - Managed Kubernetes cluster
You only need to create Worker nodes for the cluster, and Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes creates and manages Master nodes for the cluster. This type of Kubernetes cluster is easy to use, low-cost, and highly available. You can focus on the services supported by the cluster without needing to operate and maintain the Kubernetes cluster Master nodes. - Serverless Kubernetes cluster
You do not need to create or manage any Master nodes or Worker nodes for the cluster. You can directly use the Container Service console or the command line interface to set container resources, specify container images for applications, set methods to provide services, and start applications.
Alibaba Container Service for Kubernetes features:
- Alibaba Load-balancing integration.
- Automatic scaling of your cluster’s node instance count
- Hybrid Networking
- Workload Portability, on-premises and cloud
- Identity and Access Management Integration
- Logging and Monitoring
Container Registry allows you to manage images throughout the image lifecycle. It provides secure image management, stable image build creation across global regions, and easy image permission management. This service simplifies the creation and maintenance of the image registry and supports image management in multiple regions. Combined with other cloud services such as Container Service, Container Registry provides an optimized solution for using Docker in the cloud.
Alibaba Container Service provides the high-performance and scalable container application management service, which enables you to manage the lifecycle of containerized applications by using Docker and Kubernetes. Container Service provides multiple application release methods and the continuous delivery ability, and supports microservice architecture. By simplifying the setup of container cluster and integrating with the Alibaba Cloud abilities of virtualization, storage, network, and security, Container Service makes an ideal running cloud environment for containers.
Elastic Container Instance (ECI) is an agile and secure serverless container instance service. You can easily run containers without managing servers. Also you only pay for the resources that have been consumed by the containers. ECI helps you focus on your business applications instead of managing infrastructure. You can quickly and easily deploy containers to the cloud through a two-step procedure. An ECI container group is similar in concept to a pod in Kubernetes.
In any case, for scenarios where you need full container orchestration, including service discovery across multiple containers, automatic scaling, and coordinated application upgrades, the best option is Container Service for Kubernetes.
Container Service is currently free of charge. Resources used in collaboration with Container Service (including Server Load Balancer and ECS) are charged separately.
For ECI you incur charges based on the number of Elastic Container Instances (ECI) you use.
Simple Application Server & Batch Compute
Simple Application Server suits you well if all you need is a private virtual machine. It provides you the all-in-one solution to launch and manage your application, set up domain name resolution, and build, monitor, maintain your website with just a few clicks. It makes private server building much easier, and it is the best way for beginners to get started with cloud computing.
Scenarios of the Simple Application Server:
- Building a small-sized website
- Building a personal blog
- Building a forum/community
- Building a knowledge or efficiency management tool
- Building a personal learning environment
- Building a small E-commerce website
- Building a development environment
Batch Compute is a distributed cloud service suitable for processing massive volumes of data concurrently. Batch Compute supports massive concurrent jobs. The system automates resource management, job scheduling, and data loading and supports billing on a Pay-As-You-Go basis.
In terms of nonprofessional, Batch Compute allows you to submit any computing program to be run on multiple Alibaba Cloud virtual machine (VM) instances. Then, the results are written to a specified persistent storage location (such as Alibaba Cloud OSS or NAS) where you can view them.
Features:
- Support for multi-node parallel jobs
- Granular job definitions
- Job scheduling
- Dynamic compute resource provisioning and scaling
- Integrated monitoring and logging
- Fine-grained access control
Simple Application Server provides a monthly package of resources at a fixed charge and currently supports monthly and yearly pre-payment payment methods.
With Batch Compute, you pay for the compute and storage resources consumed by your jobs or clusters. There is no additional charge on resource management and job scheduling services.
Functions Compute
Language Runtimes
Java 8, Node.js 6 & 8, PHP 7.2 and Python 2.7 & 3.6
Events and Triggers
- HTTP
- Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS)
- CDN events
- Timer
- MNS topic
- Table Store
- Log Service
Timeout
The default function timeout is 3 seconds. Function timeout can be set with any value between 1 and 600 seconds..
SLA
Monthly Uptime Percentage <= 99.95%
Billing Model
Alibaba Cloud Function Compute is billed on a Pay-As-You-Go basis. The fee consists of three parts:
- The total number of function calls
- Execution duration starts when your codes begin to be run and end when the result is returned or execution is terminated. The measurement granularity is 100 milliseconds. The duration price depends on the memory size that you have allocated to functions.
- Public Network Traffic
Consumption plan pricing includes a monthly free grant of 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-s of resource consumption per month.