Alibaba Cloud ECS：Functions, usage scenarios and advantages

Introduction

The emergence of ECS can not only reduce IT costs and improve operation and maintenance efficiency, but also eliminate the cost of purchasing IT hardware for enterprises or individuals in the early stage. It also has the advantages of security, stability, flexible upgrade and upgrade, high performance, ease of use and scalability.

1.Detailed explanation of cloud server ECS functions

Alibaba Cloud Server ECS provides rich architecture, ECS instance specifications and storage types for users to choose, and users can choose the appropriate cloud server according to the actual usage scenario; Alibaba Cloud provides VPC dedicated network to create the user's network environment on the cloud The logic is completely isolated to protect the user's data security; the cloud server provides a variety of billing modes, allowing users to choose freely; the cloud server provides snapshots, mirroring and other functions to provide customers with data protection and rapid deployment.

1.1 Private network VPC

VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is a custom private network created by users based on Alibaba Cloud. Different private networks are logically isolated on the second layer. Users can create and manage cloud product instances in the private network created by themselves. Such as ECS, SLB, RDS, etc.

• Securely deploy applications

You can deploy applications that provide external services in a VPC, and control Internet access by creating security group rules and access control whitelists. You can also implement access control isolation between the application server and the database, deploy the web server in a subnet that can be accessed by the public network, and deploy the application database in a subnet that is not configured for public network access.

• Deploy applications that actively access the public network

You can deploy applications that need to actively access the public network in a subnet in the VPC, and route their traffic through the public network NAT gateway. By configuring SNAT rules, instances in the subnet can access the Internet without exposing their private IP addresses, and can replace public IP addresses at any time to avoid external attacks.

1.2 Snapshot and Multiple Mirror Type Selection

Alibaba Cloud provides longer protection period and finer protection granularity for customer data. Automatic snapshots can realize automatic data backup, and support ultra-fast snapshots and snapshot consistency groups that can be created/rolled back in seconds. Create snapshots at specified time points for ECS instances or cloud disks to prevent data loss due to external attacks and accidental deletions

Alibaba Cloud provides a wealth of images and image types for cloud servers. Public images, image markets, custom images, and community images meet the needs of various types of users for rapid deployment and flexible management of application environments. Images can be customized, distributed and shared.

1.3 ECS instance specification and storage type

The cloud server ECS instance specifications are different, and the cloud server CPU processor model, network bandwidth, network sending and receiving packet PPS, number of connections, multiple queues, cloud disk IOPS and other performance parameters are also different.

Block Storage (EBS)

Block storage EBS (Elastic Block Storage) is a low-latency, persistent, and highly reliable block-level random storage provided for cloud server ECS. Block storage supports automatic replication of your data in the availability zone, preventing data unavailability caused by unexpected hardware failures, and protecting your business from the threat of hardware failures.

2.Cloud server usage scenarios

Cloud server ECS has a wide range of application scenarios. It can be used alone as a web server or application server, and can also be integrated with other Alibaba Cloud services to provide rich solutions.

• Web application

In the initial stage of the website, the number of visits is small, and only a low-configuration cloud server ECS instance is needed to run web applications such as Apache or Nginx, databases, and storage files. With the development of the website, you can upgrade the configuration of ECS instances at any time, or increase the number of ECS instances, without worrying about insufficient resources caused by low-configuration computing units when business surges.

• Data analysis

The cloud server ECS provides a large data type instance type family, supporting business scenarios such as Hadoop distributed computing, log processing, and large data warehouses. Since the large data type instance specifications adopt the local storage architecture, the cloud server ECS can provide higher network performance for cloud Hadoop clusters and Spark clusters on the premise of ensuring massive storage space and high storage performance.

• Graphics rendering

Heterogeneous GPUs have excellent GPU computing acceleration capabilities and can achieve second-level real-time rendering of images. They are widely used in graphics rendering, cloud graphics workstations, and video transcoding.

• Deep learning

For deep learning scenarios with continuous and massive artificial neural network calculations, Alibaba Cloud recommends GPU instances, which not only have excellent performance, but also save a lot of cost. In addition, the GPU computing type can also reduce the computing power requirements of the client, and is suitable for terminal scenarios such as graphics processing, cloud real-time rendering of cloud games, and cloud real-time rendering of AR/VR.

3.Alibaba Cloud Server Advantages

Cloud servers have the advantages of stability, elasticity, security, high performance, ease of use, and scalability.

• Elasticity: Supports the creation of thousands of instances at the minute level. Multiple flexible payment options are more suitable for the current business situation, and at the same time bring elastic expansion capabilities. Instances and bandwidth can be allocated at any time. Cloud disks can be expanded;

• Security: Provide services such as DDoS protection, Trojan horse killing, etc., provide instances that support trusted computing, hardware encryption, and virtualized encrypted computing, and have passed multiple international security certifications, and ECS cloud disks support data encryption functions;

• Ease of use: Rich operating systems and application software can be easily deployed through one-click mirroring, and the same mirroring can quickly replicate the environment in multiple ECSs and expand easily;

• Scalability: ECS can be seamlessly connected with various rich cloud products of Alibaba Cloud, and can continuously provide complete computing, storage, security and other solutions for business development.