Serverless App Engine (SAE) removes the infrastructure overhead of running microservices at scale — no Kubernetes clusters to manage, no capacity to pre-provision, no CI/CD pipeline to assemble from scratch.
Find the scenario that matches your situation:
| Situation | Scenario |
|---|---|
| Migrating Spring Cloud or Dubbo applications to the cloud | Application hosting |
| Handling traffic spikes without over-provisioning resources | Auto scaling |
| Automating the path from code commit to production deployment | Continuous integration and delivery |
Application hosting
Running microservices in production means managing WAR packages, JAR packages, or Docker images across multiple services — plus the infrastructure underneath them. SAE handles the underlying resource scheduling, microservices governance, canary releases, and monitoring so your team focuses on application code, not the platform.
No infrastructure to manage. SAE removes the need to operate IaaS, Kubernetes, APM components, or self-managed registries such as ZooKeeper, Eureka, Consul, or SkyWalking.
Low migration effort. Spring Cloud and Dubbo applications move to SAE without significant code changes. Store application artifacts in Alibaba Cloud image repositories and iterate on each microservice independently.
Full microservices capabilities, out of the box. SAE provides automatic image construction, built-in canary release, traffic throttling, environment isolation, application monitoring and diagnostics, and permission management — no assembly required.
Auto scaling
Traffic spikes hit without warning — new retail, e-commerce, online education, and mutual entertainment can all overwhelm a system sized for average load. Reserving enough capacity to absorb every peak is expensive; running short during a spike breaks your SLA.
SAE resolves this by combining fine-grained auto scaling with traffic control and high-availability protection:
Guaranteed SLA during peak hours. SAE's elastic scalability, combined with the throttling and degradation capabilities of Application High Availability Service (AHAS), absorbs traffic surges and prevents system breakdown.
Scale within seconds, reduce hardware costs. Multiple auto scaling policies let you expand capacity rapidly during peaks and contract during off-peak periods. You do not need to keep your machines active with peak workloads for a long period of time.
Fast diagnosis when issues occur. SAE integrates with Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) to surface slow SQL statements, slow methods, and method-call stacks in a visual dashboard. Configure alerts and resolve online issues.
Continuous integration and delivery
Traditional deployment workflows are slow: code changes sit in review queues, build environments differ from production, and deployment scripts break between environments. SAE automates the full path from code commit to running application.
Connect SAE to the tools your team already uses:
Alibaba Cloud DevOps and Jenkins for automated pipelines from code update through compiling, image building, and deployment.
Cloud Toolkit plug-in to push on-premises applications to the cloud in a few clicks, with built-in support for remote debugging.
Source code and Container Registry for flexible artifact-based deployments.
SAE jobs to release computing resources immediately after each job completes.
The result is a continuous delivery process that replaces slow, manual iteration with automated, repeatable deployments.
