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Introduction to Alibaba Cloud
In the fast-paced world where organizations are quickly adopting or moving their conventional data centres onto big cloud players like AWS, Microsoft Azure services, Alibaba , Google cloud and so on. Which cloud provider to choose is also a big decision organizations need to make as many of them are not aware of all underlying technologies and terminologies being used in their cloud environment.
In this article we will learn more about Alibaba cloud and common terminologies used in Alibaba cloud and its features and so on.
What is Alibaba Cloud?
Alibaba came into cloud business sometime in 2009, just three years after Amazon launched its own cloud AWS. Alibaba cloud is one of the ambitious projects of the Chinese e-commerce giant. Alibaba is a premier cloud provider in China. Two years ago, Alibaba ingested a billion dollar into its ‘Aliyun’ which is Alibaba cloud in English.
Alibaba cloud is ranked fifth according to Synergy research group and majority companies in the United states are using it . Alibaba offers cloud services which are available on a pay-as-you-go basis and include Elastic Compute, Data storage, Relational databases, Big data processing , Anti-DDoS protection and content delivery systems.
Features of Alibaba Cloud
- Dozen instances types available to choose from
- Support for bare metal and virtual servers
- Compatible with windows and Linux multiple flavours
- Ability to create custom images
- Cloud storage services supported – object storage service (OSS), Elastic block storage (EBS) and Network attached storage (NAS)
- Higher number of VM processors as compared to other cloud providers
- Buy Alibaba on a pay-as-you-go, reserved instance, subscription model , preemptible instances
- Support for variety of relational database services
Alibaba Cloud – Key Terms
We will look at some commonly used key terms in Alibaba cloud more in detail below:
| Key Terms | Description |
| Alibaba Cloud account | To use Alibaba cloud services, you need to create a cloud account which has full control over Alibaba resources . Alibaba Cloud account is similar to the administrator or root user of an operating system. |
| Compute services | |
| Elastic computing | It is a state of the art infrastructure including memory and CPU and built in DDoS protection. It provides auto scaling and server load balancer charged only on the basis of runtime usage such as instance creation, public or private load balancer rental duration, and network traffic etc. it provides high performance Elastic computing services including |
| Elastic GPU service | for high demand computing such as graphics and video rendering |
| Elastic high-performance computing (E-HPC) | Support across all layers – HP CPU for LaaS , software stack for PaaS and application template customization for SaaS, ECS bare metal-based elasticity of virtual server combined with performance of physical server |
| Supercomputing cluster (SCC) | High speed Remote memory access interconnectivity etc. |
| Container services | |
| Container service | Fully managed service for securely running and managing docker applications on a distributed cluster of ECS instances |
| Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) | It is a container service which provides a runtime environment for Kubernetes based container applications . Kubernetes clusters can be deployed in ACK to integrate Alibaba services for virtualization, storage and security |
| Access Management | |
| Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) | Which uses text in JSON format for defining AC resources, configuration details and interdependencies between resources |
| Cloud resource Access management (RAM) | Centralized management under identify and access management service for users and their permissions on AC resources |
| Storage services | |
| Object storage service | Stores three copies of objects. Actual usage of storage space, network traffic and number of processed requests determine the payment. There is no data storage limit and data is highly secure with DDoS protection , monitoring of illegal logging access, SSL for data in motion, and data encryption at rest. Ease of integration with web APIs. |
| Table store | Fully managed NoSQL database service |
| Network attached storage | ECS instances, E-HPC, and other container services |
| Database services | |
| ApsaraDB for PolarDB | Is the relational database service which is compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle syntaxes. PolarDB has 100 TB storage capacity and it decouples compute and storage resources. |
| ApsaraDB for MongoDB | This is a NoSQL database based on open-source MongoDB protocol. It is a document database which features automatic monitoring and scalability |
| Network services | |
| Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | VPC services allows to create private , isolated dedicated network for cloud accounts. It can be customized to meet cloud network needs by defining IP range, route tables and network gateways |
| Content delivery and monitoring services | |
| Content delivery framework | Large volume of traffic handling with 1200+ nodes across the geographies for faster website response times, and smoother video streaming |
| Alibaba cloudMonitor | Provides advanced , customizable analytics on critical tasks such as CPU utilizations and latency/ delay. Sending suspected threat alerts via email and messaging services |
| Other services (DNS and Key management) | |
| Key management services (KMS) | Used to manage, create and control encryption keys |
| Alibaba cloud DNS | DNS service for cloud to translate domain names into machine readable IP addresses |