Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) is an Alibaba Cloud service that can simplify the management of cloud computing resources. You can create stack templates to describe cloud computing resources such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and ApsaraDB RDS instances, as well as the dependencies between resources in the templates. The ROS engine automatically creates and configures all resources in a stack based on a template, which makes automatic deployment and O&M possible.
Benefits
ROS can help you manage a collection of cloud resources in an efficient and cost-effective manner based on security compliance and business requirements.
- ROS incorporates the concept of infrastructure as code (IoC), and integrates the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) approaches into template management. This ensures that ROS is compliant with security standards.
- ROS allows you to use templates to deploy multiple resources in an efficient manner. You do not need to manually create resources.
- ROS provides a large number of sample templates and solutions, based on which you can deploy advanced solutions in complicated business scenarios.
- ROS allows you to deploy and release resources in the cloud on demand. This helps you reduce costs.
For more information, see Benefits and Application scenarios.
How ROS works
After you create a template, ROS uses the template to create stacks and automatically deploy resources. The following figure shows how ROS works.
If you want to change the resources in a stack, you can update the stack. For more information, see Update a stack.
Before you change your resources, you can create a change set to preview the changes that you want to apply to the resources. Then, you can execute the change set to apply the changes to your stack. For more information, see Overview.
Features
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Free hosting | ROS provides a fully managed and serverless O&M service that enables the automatic execution of O&M tasks. You can define Alibaba Cloud resources, describe the dependencies between the resources, configure template parameters, and then create a stack to manage the resources. ROS provides free hosting for Terraform. You can create Terraform templates and stacks to orchestrate resources on Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or Azure. Terraform is compatible with the ROS API. After you create a Terraform template, you can call ROS API operations to manage the template. |
| Resource deployment across accounts and regions | You can use a single template to implement automated deployment within multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts across regions. You can also deploy development, test, and production environments by using a single template. You can specify parameters in the template based on the requirements of the environments. For example, you can deploy 2 ECS instances in the test environment and 20 ECS instances in the production environment by using a single template. |
| Standardized deployment | ROS standardizes deployment environments and incorporates environment configurations into templates. This helps minimize the differences between environments and save deployment costs when you use ROS to implement repeated deployment. |
| Visualized deployment | You can view the deployment status of all resources that are deployed by using the ROS console or by calling API operations. You do not need to manually check the deployment process. |
| Drift detection | You can use the drift detection feature to identify the changes in the configurations of resources that do not belong to ROS. This way, you can take corrective measures to resynchronize resources with their template definitions. |
| Access control | ROS is integrated with Resource Access Management (RAM) to allow you to manage accounts and permissions in a centralized manner. ROS is also integrated with ActionTrail to allow you to review all O&M operations, including the operations on ROS. |