Sneak peek into Alibaba Cloud
Tags: alibaba, cloud, beginners
Published: 2022-07-06 11:59:49

**Alibaba Cloud**

The cloud computing service provider currently operates in 27 data center regions and 84 global availability zones. It is primarily focused on areas in mainland China and other Asia-Pacific regions, but there are also fewer regions set up in the U.S. and European Union.

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**Products & Services**

Alibaba provides an expanding range of high-performance cloud products including large-scale computing, storage resources, and Big Data processing capabilities for users around the world. Highlighting few of the most common services offered in compute, storage, database, networking aspects here. 

* Compute

Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides fast memory and the latest CPUs to power cloud applications and achieve faster results with low latency along with capability to scale up or down based on real-time demands.
Using the next-generation virtualization technology independently developed by Alibaba Cloud, ECS Bare Metal Instance features both the elasticity of a virtual server and the high-performance and comprehensive features of a physical server. This enables you to retain the elasticity capability of common ECS while delivering the same user experience as physical servers.
Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) integrates virtualization, storage, networking, and security capabilities to deploy applications in high-performance and scalable containers and provides full lifecycle management of enterprise-class containerized applications. Alibaba also offers Container Registry, a platform to manage images throughout the image life cycle with easy image permission management. This service simplifies the creation and maintenance of the image registry and supports image management in multiple regions. Combined with other cloud services such as Container Service, Container Registry provides an optimized solution for using Docker in the cloud.
Alibaba Cloud Function Compute is a fully managed, event-driven compute service focused on writing and uploading code without having to manage infrastructure such as servers. No fees are incurred for up to 1,000,000 invocations and 400,000 CU-second compute resources per month.

* Storage

High volumes of any type of unstructured data such as image, audio and video files shall be stored in the cloud with encryption and high availability using the Object Storage Service (OSS) of Alibaba. These objects come with configurations that can be modified to meet region, access controls and storage class requirements. Alibaba offers four OSS storage classes, Standard, Infrequent Access (IA), Archive and Cold Archive. 
Alibaba provides Elastic Block Storage (EBS) devices for ECS instances that come with low-latency storage, random read-write capabilities and data persistence.
Apsara File Storage service provides network attached file storage (NAS) for ECS instances, Elastic High-Performance Computing instances and Container Service for Kubernetes nodes. The distributed file system offers a maximum capacity of up to 10 PB that automatically scales when files are added or removed with encryption of data at rest and in transit. These also offer shared access, high throughput, data replication, backup and shall be accessed via standard file access protocols.

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* Database

Alibaba offers a relational database service, compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle syntaxes with a 100 TB maximum storage capacity known as the ApsaraDB for PolarDB. This has low-latency physical replication, data backup and disaster recovery. Alibaba also offers PolarDB stacks, an on-premises database management appliance.
The NoSQL database offering supports open source MongoDB protocol. ApsaraDB for MongoDB is a document database that features automatic monitoring and scalability with architecture configurations to enable standalone instances, replica set instances and sharded cluster instances.
Alibaba Cloud offers a low-cost self-service database migration experience that supports homogeneous and heterogeneous migration smoothly from hundreds of GBs to multiple TBs with minimal business impact. With over 400,000 databases successfully migrated to Alibaba Cloud, the Database Architect Team has a proven record of making the migration process an efficient and hassle-free journey. Data Transmission Service (DTS) migrate and synchronize data between data storage engines, such as relational databases, NoSQL, and OLAP, with just a few clicks.

* Networking & CDN

Server Load Balancer (SLB) distributes network traffic across groups of backend servers improving service capability and application availability. It functions as a reverse proxy at Layer 7（Application Load Balancer) and load balancing services at Layer 4 (Classic Load Balance.
Network Intelligence Service (NIS) monitors the health status and performance of networks, performs diagnostics and troubleshoots issues, and analyzes and measures network traffic. 
Alibaba Cloud PrivateZone provides a private DNS based on specified VPCs. PrivateZones resolve IP addresses and manage resources within the specific VPCs, these domain names cannot be accessed over the internet or any other resource besides the specified VPCs.

The complete list of products and services offered can be found in their official product website. 
This provides a good amount of information regarding the service and guidance to get started with.