Alibaba Cloud has released the newest generation of its enterprise-grade Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances. This new generation of ECS instances uses Intel® Cascade Lake processors, and being based on Alibaba Cloud's proprietary X-Dragon computing platform, also use Alibaba Cloud's next-generation Alibaba Virtual Switch (AVS), in-house 25-GB network architecture, and proprietary Enhanced SSDs (ESSDs) with an ultra-high IOPS. Therefore, these next-generation ECS instances have been fully upgraded in terms of metering, network, and storage.
The newest generation of ECS instances are equipped with second-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, which feature the all-core turbo frequency up to 3.2 GHz and offer a 12% to 15% increase in single-core performance. Moreover, these instances use Alibaba Cloud's proprietary X-Dragon computing platform, with CPU resources fully accessible to users. Therefore, the computing power of these sixth-generation ECS instances with the highest specifications is 20% higher than that of the last generation. When NUMA is enabled on the host, the memory access latency of an ECS instance is reduced by 30%.
In terms of storage, the next-generation enterprise-grade ECS instances fully support Alibaba Cloud's proprietary ultra-high-performance ESSDs. This is the first Chinese product that provides the quality-of-level (QoS) capability for storage IOPS and bandwidth at the instance level to ensure stable and predictable storage performance for enterprise-level users. In addition, the performance of ultra disks was also upgraded. By default, the next-generation enterprise-grade ECS instances and ECS Bare Metal Instance are equipped with ultra disks that provide higher performance.
These instances provide a maximum network bandwidth of 25 Gbps and the increased packet forwarding rate up to six million PPS. The burstable bandwidth can be more than three times that of previous-generation instances. The number of elastic network queues was increased to 32, and the number of small and medium ENI queues has doubled. The number of network connections is guaranteed by instance-level QoS, which ensures predictable network performance for enterprise-level users.
This blog takes a quick look at Alibaba Cloud's latest 6th generation instances in terms of overall upgrades, the processors and also the underlying architecture.
Alibaba Cloud's next-generation enterprise-grade ECS instances are equipped with the latest-generation Intel processors customized for Alibaba and Alibaba Cloud's proprietary 25 Gbps MoC NIC. In terms of software, these instances use Alibaba Cloud's proprietary X-Dragon Hypervisor, Cloud Network Management-based VSwitches, and ESSDs. The next-generation instances feature improved computing, network, and storage specifications, along with enhanced QoS capabilities for storage and networking. As a result, these instances provide enterprise-level users with more powerful and more stable computing services.
The following two tutorials will show you how to configure a Server Load Balancer for ECS instances created by using Alibaba Cloud's Starter Package service.
What Is Alibaba Cloud Starter Package?
Alibaba Cloud's Starter Package helps you get started instantly through simple, scalable, and cost-effective Elastic Compute Service (ECS) that caters to all your cloud hosting needs. The new SSD Cloud Server Packages provide easy-to-use, high-performance virtual machines with higher data transfer plans at hugely discounted rates for enabling you to start from as low as $2.50 a month. Since it is available across 14 global regions, you can easily choose the Datacenter Region for your servers to meet any specific requirements. It allows each user to have up to five ECS instances with the simultaneous Data Transfer Plans.
In the first tutorial, we will show you how to get started with Alibaba Cloud by using Starter Package ECS instances and will give you a walkthrough on how to create and prepare your Starter Package ECS instances.
What Is Server Load Balancer?
Server Load Balancer (SLB) service improves your applications' performance by forwarding traffic to multiple ECS instances. By distributing traffic, it extends the servicing capability of applications. SLB also helps in eliminating single points of failure (SPOFs) to improve the availability of applications.
To get started with the SLB services, you must understand the following three key components of SLB:
1.SLB Instances: SLB instance distributes incoming traffic to backend servers. To use the Server Load Balancer service, you must create an SLB instance, and configure it with at least one listener and two backend servers.
The cost for an SLB instance is calculated using the Pay-As-You-Go billing method and is computed based on your actual traffic usage. For more detailed information, refer Server Load Balancer Pricing.
2.Listeners: Once the SLB instance is created, you must configure one or more listeners for the same. A listener checks for connection requests and forwards the requests to backend servers.
- <strong>Listener Protocol</strong>: SLB supports HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and UDP protocols.
- <strong>Listening Port</strong>: It is used to receive requests and forward it to backend servers.3.Backend Servers: After configuring the listener, you need to add some ECS instances as the backend servers for your SLB instance to respond to the distributed client requests.
- <strong>Port of Backend Servers</strong>: The port opened on the backend server to receive requests. It can be the same in an SLB instance.
- <strong>Weight of Backend Servers</strong>: An ECS instance with a higher weight value receives more requests. Setting the weight value to zero is equal to removing the ECS instance from Server Load Balancer.In case, a listener is not associated with a custom server group, then by default, requests are forwarded to ECS instances in the default server group.
You can set the custom server groups in the listener via VServer group mode. VServer Groups also helps to meet the requirements of domain forwarding and URL redirections.
This tutorial is the second part of the two-part series on how to configure Load Balancer for ECS instances created by using Alibaba Cloud Starter Package. In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up the Server Load Balancer for the ECS instances launched while explaining the preceding part of this tutorial series.
Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides fast memory and the latest Intel CPUs to help you to power your cloud applications and achieve faster results with low latency.
Deploy ECS instances with just a few clicks from the easy-to-use console and scale capacity up or down based on real-time demands.
Alibaba Cloud Server Load Balancer (SLB) distributes traffic among multiple instances to improve the service capabilities of your applications. You can use SLB to prevent single point of failures (SPOFs) and improve the availability and the fault tolerance capability of your applications.
This topic describes the release notes of ECS features.
This topic describes the release notes of ECS features.
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