Alibaba Cloud AI Containers (AC2) is a collection of AI container images with built-in hardware acceleration libraries, AI runtimes, and AI frameworks — optimized for the Alibaba Cloud infrastructure to deliver better AI performance and experience across ECS, ACK, and ECI. AC2 images are free to use.
Supported services and workloads
AC2 runs on the following Alibaba Cloud compute services:
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| Elastic Compute Service (ECS) | Virtual machines on Alibaba Cloud |
| Elastic Container Instance (ECI) | Serverless container instances |
| Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) | Managed Kubernetes service |
AC2 supports both inference and training workloads.
Features and benefits
Out-of-the-box — Ships with hardware drivers, AI runtimes, and AI frameworks pre-installed, so you can deploy immediately.
Free maintenance and support — Alibaba Cloud provides maintenance and technical support at no charge.
Easy package management — Manage AC2 images across different operating systems using YUM (Yellowdog Updater Modified) or APT (Advanced Package Tool).
Infrastructure optimization — Deeply optimized for and integrated with ECS, ACK, and ECI to continuously improve runtime performance on Alibaba Cloud infrastructure.
End-to-end security — Images are built, tested, released, and maintained in a secure and stable manner.
Ecosystem support — Inherits the base system ecosystem and introduces the AI ecosystem repository (epao repository) from the OpenAnolis community, so you can install AI software packages directly via YUM.
Billing
AC2 images are free of charge. You may be billed for other resources used alongside the images, such as vCPUs, memory, storage, public bandwidth, and snapshots.
Available images
See Alibaba Cloud AI Containers images for available images.