This topic describes how to activate and configure Elastic Compute Service (ECS).

Background information

We recommend that you build the short video demo on an ECS instance. Compared with physical hardware, ECS allows you to purchase computing power, storage, and bandwidth any time as needed. In the following example, you can assign a public IP address to the ECS instance. You can also assign a RAM role to the ECS instance. This way, the applications that are deployed on the ECS instance can access Alibaba Cloud services such as ApsaraVideo VOD by using Security Token Service (STS) authorization. Using STS to access resources is more secure and convenient than using AccessKey.

Configure ECS

  1. Purchase an ECS instance. For more information, see Elastic Compute Service.
    Note
    • In this example, only a basic ECS instance is required. We recommend that you purchase an ECS instance with 1 vCPU and 1 GB of memory on a weekly basis. For example, you can purchase an s6 shared instance or a t5 burstable instance. You can select the pay-by-data-transfer billing method for bandwidth. You can release the bandwidth resources when you no longer need the short video demo that you build. In this case, you only need to pay about USD 1.57 for bandwidth.
    • Specify a custom password as the logon credential. This simplifies the Secure Shell (SSH) logon process and the file transmission in Secure Copy (SCP) when you build the demo. To publish your service to the production environment, we recommend that you purchase an ECS instance based on your business needs and use a key pair as the logon credential.
    • In this topic, the image Ubuntu 18.04 is used. You can also select the image of another Linux distribution as needed.
  2. Log on to the ECS console.
  3. Click the ID of the ECS instance that you purchased.
  4. In the left-side navigation pane, click Security Groups.
  5. Click the ID of the security group of the ECS instance that you purchased.
  6. On the Inbound tab, click Add. Then, set the Destination parameter to 8080 and the Source parameter to 0.0.0.0/0.
    Note To enable another port, set the preceding parameters as needed.