what is EDS? - Elastic Desktop Service - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

Alibaba Cloud Elastic Desktop Service (EDS) provides a desktop service that is secure, efficient, and easy to use in the cloud. You can use EDS to quickly create and manage cloud computers and build a secure and flexible office system.

Why EDS?

EDS is a powerful tool designed for the digital economy. With this service, you can work and use various applications in the cloud, anytime and anywhere. In addition, this service leverages Alibaba Cloud to unleash massive computing power and ensure comprehensive security of business and data. EDS provides the following benefits:

Flexible configuration and billing: Abundant cloud computers with different specifications of vCPUs and GPUs are provided in multiple regions. You can access cloud computers from various types of Alibaba Cloud Workspace terminals. You can flexibly configure and quickly purchase cloud computers based on your business requirements. The cloud computers are immediately usable with a few clicks upon purchase.
Centralized management and efficient O&M: You can use the Alibaba Cloud Management Console to manage and maintain cloud computers and other resources in a centralized manner.
Easy network access and data protection: Cloud computers rely on powerful Alibaba Cloud infrastructure to ensure easy network access. Security gateways are used to isolate cloud computer networks from the Internet to ensure network security. Combined with a variety of security policies and audit features, EDS provides fine-grained management of permissions and account systems to ensure auditable and traceable operations. This frees your worries about data security.
Integrated with enterprise Active Directory (AD) systems: Cloud computers can be connected to the verification systems of enterprises to provide enterprise-grade management capabilities. Cloud computers can communicate with each other across networks and regions. This helps manage multiple branches of enterprises in a centralized manner.

For more information, see Benefits and Common scenarios.

Comparison between EDS and ECS

Item	EDS	ECS
Overview	EDS is a computing-based Desktop as a Service (DaaS) offering provided by Alibaba Cloud. EDS is easy to use and highly secure, and allows you to manage your cloud computers in an efficient manner.	Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is a high-performance, stable, reliable, and scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering provided by Alibaba Cloud.
Scenario	Remote work Multi-branch collaboration Secure office automation (OA) Short-term usage Graphic design Real-time rendering for cloud games Real-time rendering AI for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications	Enterprise websites and lightweight web applications Multimedia and high-concurrency applications or websites that have low traffic and require only a low-configuration ECS instance to run web applications such as Apache and nginx, host databases, and store files Databases that have high I/O requirements, such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and NoSQL databases Applications or websites that may experience sharp traffic fluctuations, such as snatcher bots, coupon applications, e-commerce websites, and ticket-grabbing websites Big data and real-time online and offline analysis AI applications, such as applications of machine learning and deep learning
Support for hosting self-built websites on servers	No	Yes
Support for Internet access	Yes	Yes
Security group control	Security group: EDS allows you to configure a security group to control inbound and outbound traffic of cloud computers. This improves the network security of cloud computers. Security group rule: A security group rule consists of attributes, such as the rule direction, priority, CIDR block, protocol type, port range, and authorization policy. For more information, see Configure a security group. Rule direction: You can set the Rule Direction parameter to Inbound or Outbound to control inbound and outbound traffic of cloud computers. Note By default, cloud computers allow all outbound access requests. For inbound access requests, the following rules apply: Cloud computers deny all inbound access requests originated from the Internet. By default, cloud computers deny all inbound access requests from an enterprise private network. However, you can create inbound rules and add the rules to your security group to allow inbound access requests from specific IP addresses. Inbound: controls whether to allow requests destined for cloud computers. Outbound: controls whether to allow requests originated from cloud computers.	Security group: A security group in ECS acts as a virtual firewall to control inbound and outbound traffic of ECS instances that are associated with the security group to improve security. Security group rule: A security group rule consists of attributes, such as the access rule, priority, CIDR block, protocol type, port range, and authorization policy. For more information, see Overview. Access rule: You can associate inbound and outbound rules with ECS instances to control inbound and outbound access to the ECS instances. Note By default, ECS instances allow all outbound access requests. Inbound: controls whether to allow requests destined to ECS instances. Outbound: controls whether to allow requests originated from ECS instances.