Alibaba Cloud Linux - Elastic Compute Service - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

Scope

Alibaba Cloud Linux supports the following:

Supports various instance families, including Elastic Bare Metal Instance. For more information, see Instance families.
- Instances with 1 to 768 vCPUs.
- Instances with 0.5 GiB to 12,288 GiB of memory.
- Non-I/O-optimized instances are not supported.
Supports various cloud workloads, such as databases, cloud-native containers, data analytics, and web applications.

Billing

Alibaba Cloud Linux 2/3/4 are free images, but when you use an Alibaba Cloud Linux image to create an ECS instance, you are charged for the costs of instance resources, such as vCPUs, memory, storage, public bandwidth, and snapshots.

Maintenance cycle

Version	Development support phase	Maintenance support phase	Extended support phase	End of support date
Alibaba Cloud Linux 4	July 2025–June 2030	July 2030–June 2035	July 2035–June 2038	2038-06-30
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3	April 2021–March 2026	April 2026–March 2031	April 2031–March 2034	2034-03-31
Alibaba Cloud Linux 2	April 2016–March 2021	April 2021–March 2024	April 2024–March 2026	2026-03-31

Advantages

Alibaba Cloud Linux has the following advantages over other Linux distributions:

Alibaba Cloud provides complimentary software maintenance and technical support for Alibaba Cloud Linux.
Deeply optimized for the Alibaba Cloud infrastructure, it continuously improves system startup speed and runtime performance. Proven through extensive use across Alibaba Group and Alibaba Cloud services, it offers exceptional stability.
It provides the latest operating system enhancements from the Linux community for cloud application environments, including updated Linux kernels, user-space software, and toolchains.
- Alibaba Cloud Linux 4 is based on Linux kernel 6.6 LTS. It includes GCC 12.3.0, glibc 2.38, and other base packages by default, and enables cgroup v2 by default.
- Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 is based on Linux kernel 5.10 LTS and includes GCC 10.2, binutils 2.35, and glibc 2.32 by default.
- Alibaba Cloud Linux 2 is based on Linux kernel 4.19 LTS and provides devtoolset support for GCC 7.3.1, 8.2.1, and 9.1.1. For more information about how to use devtoolset, see Use experimental software packages.
It is compatible with the CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ecosystems. Most software for CentOS and RHEL can run on Alibaba Cloud Linux with no or only minor modifications.
- Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 is built on Anolis OS 8 and is compatible with the CentOS 8 and RHEL 8 ecosystems.
- Alibaba Cloud Linux 2 is built on Anolis OS 7 and is compatible with the CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 ecosystems.
Alibaba Cloud Linux 4 is built on Anolis OS 23 and is the first self-developed operating system in the Alibaba Cloud Linux series.
It provides security vulnerability monitoring and patching to ensure continuous system security. For more information, see Security bulletins.

Alibaba Cloud Linux images

Free Alibaba Cloud Linux images

Distribution	Image name	Description
Alibaba Cloud Linux 4	Alibaba Cloud Linux 4 LTS 64-bit	The default standard image that supports the x86 architecture.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 4 LTS 64-bit ARM Edition	The default standard image that supports the ARM architecture.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 4 LTS 64-bit Container Optimized Edition	Optimized for container use cases on the x86 architecture.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 4 LTS 64-bit Container Optimized ARM Edition	Optimized for container use cases on the ARM architecture.
Alibaba Cloud Linux 3	Alibaba Cloud Linux 3.2104 64-bit	The default standard image that supports the x86 architecture.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 3.2104 64-bit Quick Launch Edition	This custom image supports Quick Boot (Qboot). Based on Alibaba Cloud Kernel, it boots the virtual machine directly from the kernel. ECS instances created from this image boot significantly faster than those created from other images. The default runtime environment is identical to that of the standard image. Notes about the Quick Launch Edition image: Acceleration applies only to the first startup of the instance. Subsequent startups occur at normal speed. It accelerates the kernel boot speed by optimizing the memory initialization process and modularizing time-consuming boot components, such as mouse devices. It replaces the Cloud-init service with the latest AliyunInit service to reduce the OS initialization time. The kernel of this image cannot be modified. Unsupported instance families: gpu-accelerated compute-optimized, vgpu-accelerated, FPGA-accelerated compute, NPU-accelerated compute, heterogeneous computing, Super Computing Cluster (SCC), and security-enhanced instance family.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 3.2104 64-bit UEFI Edition	Based on the default standard image for the x86 architecture, this image supports only the UEFI boot mode.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 3.2104 64-bit ARM Edition	The default standard image that supports the ARM architecture.
Alibaba Cloud Linux 2	Alibaba Cloud Linux 2.1903 LTS 64-bit	The default standard image that supports the x86 architecture.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 2.1903 LTS 64-bit Quick Launch Edition	This custom image supports Quick Boot (Qboot). Based on Alibaba Cloud Kernel, it boots the virtual machine directly from the kernel. ECS instances created from this image boot significantly faster than those created from other images. The default runtime environment is identical to that of the standard image. Notes about the Quick Launch Edition image: Acceleration applies only to the first startup of the instance. Subsequent startups occur at normal speed. It accelerates the kernel boot speed by optimizing the memory initialization process and modularizing time-consuming boot components, such as mouse devices. It replaces the Cloud-init service with the latest AliyunInit service to reduce the OS initialization time. The kernel of this image cannot be modified. Unsupported instance families: gpu-accelerated compute-optimized, vgpu-accelerated, FPGA-accelerated compute, NPU-accelerated compute, heterogeneous computing, Super Computing Cluster (SCC), and security-enhanced instance family.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 2.1903 LTS 64-bit UEFI Edition	Based on the default standard image for the x86 architecture, this image supports only the UEFI boot mode.
	Alibaba Cloud Linux 2.1903 64-bit Trusted Edition	Based on the default standard image for the x86 architecture, this image supports Alibaba Cloud trusted instances.

For the latest image IDs of Alibaba Cloud Linux, see Alibaba Cloud Linux 4 release notes, Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 image release notes, and Alibaba Cloud Linux 2 image release notes.

Elastic Compute Service:Alibaba Cloud Linux