Alibaba Cloud

 

Alibaba Cloud offers a full range of cloud products and services for databases, networking, security, analytics & big data, domains & website management, application services, media services, middleware, and more. In this section we provide an overview of the Alibaba Cloud services, including their key compute, storage, and management offerings.

Elastic Computing

Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Compute Service (ECS), with state-of-the-art infrastructure (memory, CPUs) and built-in anti-DDoS protection, is offered across 17 international regions with multiple availability zones — all managed from a single global account.

Running on both the Windows and Linux operating systems, Alibaba Cloud’s basic ECS service includes Auto Scaling and Server Load Balancer, both of which are charged only by runtime usage, such as ECS instance creation, actual public or private load balancer rental durations, and network traffic.

AC also provides high-performance elastic compute services, including:

• Elastic GPU Service (EGS): Alibaba Cloud’s GPU is for high-demand computing such as graphics and video rendering, deep learning, and so on.
• Elastic High Performance Computing (E-HPC): HP support across all layers: HP CPU for IaaS, HP computing software stack for PaaS, and application template customization for SaaS.
• ECS Bare Metal (EBM): Based on AC’s own virtualization technology, EBM instances combine the elasticity of a virtual server with the performance and features of a physical server.
• Super Computing Cluster (SCC): Based on EBM instances and high-speed RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) interconnectivity, SCC servers provide superior network performance and increase the acceleration ratio of large-scale clusters.

With containers now playing a prominent role in app architectures, Alibaba Cloud’s Container Service is a fully-managed service for securely running and managing Docker applications on a distributed cluster of ECS instances. Alibaba Cloud users can create container clusters in a single click, all fully compatible with standard Docker APIs. AC also provides a Container Registry, with secure and convenient image hosting, image building services, and image permission features.

With orchestration a key requirement in today’s complex cloud-based infrastructures, Alibaba Cloud offers a Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) that uses text files in JSON format (with templates provided) for defining required AC resources, dependencies among resources, and configuration details.

Alibaba Cloud Storage and Infrastructure

Alibaba Cloud’s Object Storage Service (OSS) guarantees 99.9% availability by storing three copies of objects. There is no upfront cost or long-term commitment, with payment determined by actual usage of storage space, network traffic, and number of requests processed.

There are no data storage limits and data is kept secure through multi-level security, DDoS protection, monitoring of illegal logging access, SSL for data in transit, and encryption for data at rest. OSS supports easy web integration via the leading RESTful APIs.

Other Alibaba Cloud storage and infrastructure services include:

• Table Store: A fully managed NoSQL database service.
• Content Delivery Network: Handles large volumes of traffic, with 1,200+ nodes across the globe for fast website response times, and smooth video streaming.
• Network Attached Storage for ECS instances, E-HPC, and the Container Service.

Management

Management tools are core to any public cloud provider’s offering and Alibaba Cloud has this area covered as well, with:

• Alibaba CloudMonitor, which provides advanced, customizable analytics on critical metrics such as CPU utilization and latency. It also alerts to suspected threats via messaging and email.
• Alibaba Cloud Resource Access Management (RAM): An identity and access control service for centralized management of users and their permissioned access to AC resources.
• Key Management Service (KMS): AC users can use this service to create, control and manage encryption keys.