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Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh:ASM Lab overview

Last Updated:Feb 06, 2026

ASM Lab lets you build a complete environment for a specific scenario with one click. The environment includes workloads and all declarative API custom resources (CRs). You can view the configurations of any resource in a scenario to learn how to configure it. This helps you master the features used in the scenario. This topic describes the features of ASM Lab and how to create an ASM Lab.

Background information

ASM provides rich features that cover route management, security, and observability. To help you better understand these features, we provide detailed documentation, including feature usage scenarios, configuration steps, and actual effects. However, if you are not familiar with ASM, it may be difficult for you to configure an environment according to the documentation. Even if you are familiar with ASM, you may not want to spend too much time in the complex configuration process to experience new features quickly.

To meet these needs, the ASM team launched the ASM Lab feature. Each ASM Lab demonstrates a specific scenario and automatically deploys the required resources. The degree of control that you have varies by scenario. This lets you build a scenario environment with one click and quickly experience the powerful features of ASM.

Create an ASM Lab

Important

To provide access to resources, such as the demo applications and built-in monitoring dashboards for an ASM Lab scenario, the ASM Lab instance creates load balancers and exposes them to the public network. These load balancers provide access only to workloads that are related to the ASM Lab instance.

Create an ASM Lab by calling an API operation

You can call the OpenAPI CreateServiceMesh operation and configure the following parameters to create an ASM Lab instance.

Parameter

Value

RegionId

The region ID.

IstioVersion

The version of Istio. The default is the latest version.

VpcId

The ID of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

VSwitches

The IDs of vSwitches.

ApiServerPublicEip

A Boolean value that specifies whether to associate an elastic IP Address (EIP) with the API server.

playgroundScene

The ID of the ASM Lab scenario. For more information, see ASM Lab scenarios.

Expected API response:

{
  "RequestId": "3D3BA91A-567D-5AA1-xxxxxxx",
  "ServiceMeshId": "c45798a2ef1e3444xxxxxxxx"
}

You can use the returned ServiceMeshId to call other OpenAPI operations and query information about the ASM Lab instance. For example, you can call the DescribeServiceMeshUpgradeStatus operation to query the creation status of the ASM Lab instance, or call the DescribeServiceMeshKubeconfig operation to obtain the kubeconfig file for the ASM Lab.

ASM Lab scenarios

Scenario name

Input parameter

Details

Peak exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) load balancing

ewmaLb

ASM Lab: Peak EWMA load balancing scenario