Alibaba ACA Cloud Business study guide
Alibaba ACA Cloud Business · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Alibaba ACA Cloud Business credential is a professional certification offered through Alibaba Cloud's education and certification program, aimed at validating cloud and AI skills with industry-recognized credentials. It suits business-oriented practitioners - presales consultants, solution architects working with commercial stakeholders, product and project managers, and early-career cloud professionals - who need to reason about Alibaba Cloud's portfolio rather than administer individual resources. The Alibaba ACA Cloud Business study guide has 4 sections and about 1,283 words.
01Alibaba Cloud Products and Services
Alibaba Cloud's catalog is best learned by function , not by memorizing every SKU. Group services into compute (ECS instances and images, auto scaling, container service ACK, serverless Function Compute), storage (Object Storage Service OSS for unstructured objects, cloud disks and NAS for block/file, and archive tiers), networking (VPC, vSwitches, security groups, SLB/ALB load balancing, EIP, CEN for multi-VPC and hybrid connectivity, Express Connect for dedicated lines), database (ApsaraDB RDS, PolarDB, Redis, MongoDB, Tablestore), and management/security (RAM for identity and permissions, CloudMonitor, ActionTrail, WAF, Anti-DDoS).
336 words, about 2 min02Cloud Architecture and Solution Design
Design questions test trade-offs, not product trivia. Core concepts: high availability through multi-zone (multi-AZ) deployment and load balancing; elasticity via Auto Scaling and serverless; decoupling with message queues (MQ) and asynchronous processing; caching with Redis or CDN to cut latency; and security layering with VPC isolation, security groups, RAM least privilege, and WAF/Anti-DDoS at the edge.
312 words, about 2 min03Business Scenarios and Migration
Migration questions combine assessment, transfer, and cutover. Understand the migration lifecycle: inventory and dependency mapping, TCO/business-case analysis, choosing a migration pattern (rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, retain), moving data, validating, then cutting over with a rollback plan.
326 words, about 2 min04AI and Generative AI Solutions
Generative AI questions focus on architecture choices around large models. Key concepts: foundation models accessed via API (Alibaba's Qwen family, offered through Model Studio/DashScope-style platforms), inference hosting on GPU ECS or PAI (Platform for AI) for training and custom models, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground answers in private data.
309 words, about 2 min