Alibaba Cloud Launches ECS Automated O&M Kit

By Alibaba Cloud ECS

The development of cloud computing has promoted the rise of trends such as automated O&M, DevOps, and AIOps. In today's rapidly changing business, enterprises are hoping to improve O&M efficiency through an automated O&M expert system and to provide business support.

Traditionally, forming a mature DevOps process requires a lot of technical investment. If commercial software is used, there will be significant expenses as well. Either way, it means a lot of time and financial costs. Cloud computing is changing all that.

ECS Automated O&M Kit for the Cloud

On February 3, 2021, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of the automated O&M kit with Elastic Compute Service (ECS). This kit is a cloud-native product that is free of charge and requires no deployment. Moreover, it helps enterprises achieve automated O&M from all aspects of planning, migration, deployment, elastic scaling, and even routine management, covering the entire lifecycle of the cloud infrastructure.

Note: At the time of writing, the ECS Automated O&M Kit is only available for Mainland China customers.

Zhang Xiantao, head of elastic computing at Alibaba Cloud, said that the ECS automated O&M kit is a truly cloud-oriented automated O&M System. The kit can maximize the value of cloud and enable enterprises to enjoy the benefits of cloud technology.

The ECS automated O&M kit includes 13 tools, such as server migration center, resource orchestration, and O&M orchestration, covering more than 20 common O&M scenarios such as cross-region deployment and scheduled snapshots. With the automated O&M kit of Alibaba Cloud, enterprises can achieve up to 10 times increase in efficiency under migration, deployment, and expansion scenarios, realizing a qualitative shift from manual to automated.

Today, enterprises need to manage hundreds of thousands of cloud servers on the cloud. So how to efficiently manage them in batches has become an important issue. Even for small and medium-sized enterprises, whether they build their own server rooms or are on the cloud, they still need to complete major O&M operations such as online and offline operations, scaling up and scaling down, upgrading and rolling back. So, it is no doubt that having a mature O&M system is increasingly necessary for enterprises.

If all O&M teams choose to write their own scripts or develop automated tools, dozens of automated tools may be developed. The costs undoubtedly increase because different businesses use different development environments and components, so the teams may need to develop different automation tools. However, the cloud provides a standardized and low-cost choice.

Alibaba Cloud revealed that the number of users of the Operation Orchestration Service (OOS) has increased by 10 times in the past year, and 1 million automated O&M operations are completed through OOS templates every month. More than 1 million cloud resources are created through Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) and the Auto Scaling Service (ESS) allows more than 300,000 cloud servers to scale up and down per month. These data reflect the tremendous value of cloud-based automated O&M tools to enterprises. The related functions have served nearly 10,000 enterprises and more than 100,000 individual users.

Alibaba Cloud ECS has released the ECS automated O&M kit, allowing users to build an automated O&M system on the cloud.

Four Features of ECS Automated O&M Kit

Due to factors such as history, enterprise scale, and costs, different enterprises have varying levels of automated IT O&M. Alibaba Cloud has found through research that the current automated O&M of enterprises is still far from a complete AIOps solution. However, many enterprises have already realized semi-automation, and even some enterprises have realized high automation.

Today, trends such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automation, and intelligence are the irresistible trend in the O&M field, and the design of Alibaba Cloud ECS automated O&M kit fully reflects these features. At the same time, as a set of general-purpose O&M tools, this kit takes into account the diversity of business scenarios of different enterprises, and provides a large number of basic and atomic capabilities for enterprises with great freedom.

The head of related products of Alibaba Cloud concluded that the ECS automated O&M kit has the following four advantages.

Full-process coverage: This kit covers the entire lifecycle management of enterprise ECS instances, from cloud migration, deployment, emergency scaling, to routine automated O&M. The kit truly implements the trend of IaC.

Flexible customization: The tools of this kit based on an automated deployment and orchestration with event-driven system allow customers to customize business templates that suit their own high-frequency business scenarios by automated machines. Meanwhile, share the business with others is also supported. In addition, the kit supports open-source tools such as Terraform.

Agile and high efficiency: The design based on templates and codes will fast response operations in high-frequency and in batch with machines. Moreover, the design will help enterprises quickly automate basic O&M services and thereby accelerating DevOps. By doing so can maximize the O&M efficiency and improve O&M personnel happiness without manual operations.

Intelligence and easy-to-use: All automated O&M tools in the kit do not need to be installed. Its capabilities include automated model selection, intelligent instance diagnosis and repair, resource consulting, and one-click cloud migration can help accomplish complex tasks without manual learning and operations.

At the same time, the kit embodies the concept of templating or coding. Alibaba Cloud believes that standardized, templating, and coding-based automated O&M will be the foundation of AIOps. When all O&M can be automated in a standard manner, AI can have the opportunity to learn and AIOps can become a reality.

Build Automated O&M System at a Low Cost for Enterprises

In the traditional IT era, only large enterprises can build mature O&M platforms, while small ones can only use open-source tools or develop simple automation tools themselves. Today, whether it is a start-up team of only two people or a mature enterprise with thousands of people, they all can build their own automation tools on Alibaba Cloud.

As a cloud platform that integrates millions of users, Alibaba Cloud has accumulated a wealth of application architecture templates and scenario-based automated O&M templates. Therefore, users on the Alibaba Cloud could obtain the most mature automated O&M solutions at no cost. Diversified custom functions together with event systems allow users to build a stable and secure DevOps solution at a low cost.

Moreover, the products provided by Alibaba Cloud are constantly evolving, allowing enterprises to build DevOps systems not only based on their own capabilities, but also with the addition of cloud platform capabilities.

"Every enterprise that goes to the cloud is like being equipped with an advanced and constantly evolving factory. There is no need to be built from scratch with every machine and every pipeline at its disposal at all times. This is also why Alibaba Cloud advocates Cloud DevOps," Zhang Xiantao said.

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Alibaba Cloud Launches ECS Automated O&M Kit

ECS Automated O&M Kit for the Cloud

Four Features of ECS Automated O&M Kit

Build Automated O&M System at a Low Cost for Enterprises

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