Pre-requisite: Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud is a subsidiary of Alibaba Group that provides a suite of cloud computing services, including data storage, virtual machines, and artificial intelligence. It is one of the largest cloud computing providers in China and has a growing presence in other parts of the world. Alibaba Cloud offers a wide range of services, including cloud computing, data storage, networking, big data, and artificial intelligence services. It also provides a platform for developers to build and deploy their own applications.
In addition to its core cloud computing services, Alibaba Cloud also offers a variety of other products and services, such as:
- Database services: including relational databases, NoSQL databases, and in-memory databases
- Analytics and big data services: including data warehousing, data lakes, and data visualization
- Internet of Things (IoT) services: including device management, data collection, and data analysis
- Security services: including threat detection, web application firewall, and secure data transfer
- Artificial intelligence (AI) services: including image and video recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning
- Network services: including content delivery networks, domain name systems, and virtual private clouds.
Alibaba Cloud also provides a range of tools and services to help developers create, deploy, and manage their applications, including a container service, a serverless computing platform, and a developer portal.
Alibaba Cloud has a global presence, with data centers and points of presence in Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia. It serves many customers, including small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprises, and government organizations.
Infrastructure as a Service
Alibaba Cloud IaaS is a cloud computing service provided by Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the Chinese company Alibaba Group. IaaS is one of the three main categories of cloud computing services, along with PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service). It provides a wide range of services to customers, including virtual servers, storage, and networking.
- It is a highly scalable and flexible cloud computing service that provides a wide range of services and features to help you manage and protect your cloud resources. Because of its rich feature set and its focus on the Chinese market, it can be a good solution for businesses that are looking to expand into China or have a large user base inside China.
- It is also cost-effective compared to other cloud service providers. It provides a pay-as-you-go model and also offers discounts for long-term and reserved instances. In addition, it also has a free trial package, which lets you test out its services and evaluate if they’re the right fit for your needs before committing to a long-term contract.
- It is particularly well-suited for customers with workloads that are sensitive to latency and need to be located in China. The cloud infrastructure is served in many regions inside China. And also have a presence in other countries.
Key Services of Alibaba IaaS
- Elastic Compute Service (ECS): This service provides customers with virtual servers that can be easily resized and managed through the Alibaba Cloud console. ECS supports a wide range of operating systems, including Windows and Linux, and allows customers to choose from a variety of instance types, including general-purpose, memory-optimized, and high-performance instances.
- Simple Storage Service (S3): This service provides customers with scalable, high-performance object storage. S3 allows customers to store and retrieve large amounts of data and features built-in data protection and disaster recovery capabilities.
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): This service allows customers to create virtual networks in the cloud, and provides customers with complete control over the network configuration. VPC also allows customers to connect their on-premises networks to the cloud using VPN and Direct Connect.
- Elastic IP: this service provides a static public IP address that can be associated with an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network. So that user can keep their IP address even if they stop or restart the associated ECS instance.
- Alibaba Cloud CDN: This service provides customers with content delivery networks that are optimized for delivering content to users in China and around the world.
In addition to these services, Alibaba Cloud IaaS also provides a wide range of tools and services for managing and monitoring your cloud resources, such as CloudMonitor for monitoring performance and CloudFormation for automating the creation of cloud resources. And also provide load balancing and auto-scaling for resource management.
Security Features
- Security Group: This service allows you to control access to your ECS instances by creating security groups and applying them to your instances. You can also create custom rules to control access to your instances based on IP addresses and ports.
- Anti-DoS: This service provides protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which can flood your network with traffic and make your services unavailable. Anti-DDoS can detect and mitigate DDoS attacks in real-time, and provides different protection plans based on the level of traffic you expect to receive.
- Key Management Service (KMS): This service allows you to manage and use encryption keys to secure your data. KMS provides a centralized key management system that you can use to create and manage encryption keys and provides a range of encryption algorithms to choose from.
- Server Load Balancer (SLB): this service provides automatic distribution of incoming traffic across multiple ECS instances. SLB can also health check instances, and route traffic based on IP addresses and ports and it also supports SSL offloading.