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Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh:ASM Lab overview

Last Updated:Mar 11, 2026

Service Mesh (ASM) covers route management, security, and observability -- but configuring an environment to try these features requires deploying workloads, writing custom resources (CRs), and wiring services together. ASM Lab removes this setup work. Each lab provisions a complete, scenario-specific environment through a single API call. The environment includes all required workloads and declarative API custom resources (CRs), ready to explore immediately.

How it works

  1. Call the CreateServiceMesh API operation with a playgroundScene parameter that identifies the scenario.

  2. ASM provisions a mesh instance and automatically deploys the workloads and CRs for that scenario.

  3. After provisioning completes, access the demo applications and built-in monitoring dashboards through the load balancers that ASM Lab creates.

The degree of control varies by scenario.

Create an ASM Lab

Call the CreateServiceMesh API operation with the following parameters:

ParameterDescription
RegionIdRegion ID.
IstioVersionIstio version. Defaults to the latest version.
VpcIdVirtual Private Cloud (VPC) ID.
VSwitchesvSwitch IDs within the VPC.
ApiServerPublicEipBoolean value that specifies whether to associate an Elastic IP Address (EIP) with the API server.
playgroundSceneASM Lab scenario ID. See Available scenarios.

Expected response

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

Verify the lab status

Use the returned ServiceMeshId to track provisioning and retrieve access credentials:

Important

ASM Lab creates load balancers exposed to the public network. These load balancers provide access to demo applications and built-in monitoring dashboards for the lab scenario. They serve only workloads associated with the ASM Lab instance.

Available scenarios

ScenarioplaygroundScene valueDetails
Peak Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) load balancingewmaLbASM Lab: Peak EWMA load balancing scenario