Alibaba Cloud Core Products
What to know
Organize products by job. Compute: Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances with instance families (general, compute-optimized, memory-optimized), images, and auto scaling. Storage: Object Storage Service (OSS) for unlimited object storage accessed by bucket/key with storage classes (Standard, Infrequent Access, Archive); cloud disks (ESSD, SSD, efficient) attached to ECS; NAS for shared file access. Networking: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with vSwitches, security groups, and an internet gateway or NAT gateway; Server Load Balancer (SLB) and Application Load Balancer; Content Delivery Network (CDN); Alibaba Cloud DNS. Databases: ApsaraDB RDS (MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL), PolarDB, Redis, and Tablestore. Messaging and decoupling: Message Queue. Identity and management: Resource Access Management (RAM).
Traps in questions
- OSS is object storage, not a filesystem; you cannot mount it as a block device. Use NAS for shared POSIX-style access and cloud disks for single-instance block storage.
- A VPC is region-scoped; vSwitches are zone-scoped. Instances in different zones of one VPC communicate over the private network.
- Security groups are stateful instance-level firewalls; network ACLs are stateless subnet-level filters.
- SLB distributes traffic; auto scaling changes capacity. Questions often conflate the two.
- OSS storage class changes affect retrieval cost and latency - Archive is cheapest to store, slowest to retrieve.
Worked example
A team needs shared configuration files readable by many ECS instances across zones, with occasional large media uploads served globally. Rule of thumb: shared mutable files → NAS; static media at scale → OSS plus CDN. Pair OSS with CDN so edge nodes cache content and origin load drops.
Rule of thumb
Pick the storage by access pattern: block for one instance, file for many instances, object for HTTP-scale unstructured data.