Alibaba ACP Cloud Computing key terms

A geographic area containing multiple isolated data centers. Resources in different regions are completely isolated, and you must choose a region when creating most Alibaba Cloud resources.

A physical data center within a region, with independent power and network. Deploying across zones improves fault tolerance and reduces latency for nearby users.

A virtual server in Elastic Compute Service. You choose its instance type, image, disk, and network settings, then manage it like a physical server.

A predefined combination of vCPU, memory, and network capacity. Families are optimized for general purpose, compute, memory, or other workloads.

A template containing an operating system and optional software used to create ECS instances. Images can be public, custom, or shared.

A stateful virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic for ECS instances. Rules allow or deny traffic by protocol, port, and source or destination.

Virtual Private Cloud: a logically isolated network you define with your own IP address range, subnets, route tables, and gateways.

A subnet within a VPC that has its own CIDR block and belongs to a single zone. ECS instances and other resources are launched into a VSwitch.

Server Load Balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend servers to improve availability and scalability. It supports layer 4 and layer 7 listeners.

Elastic IP address: a public IP that you can hold independently and bind to or unbind from ECS instances, NAT gateways, and SLB instances.

A managed service that lets instances in a VPC access the internet or receive inbound connections without exposing their private IP addresses.

A managed domain name resolution service that maps domain names to IP addresses. It supports global traffic management and health checks.

A container for objects in Object Storage Service. Buckets have a globally unique name, a region, and configurable access control and storage class.

The basic data unit stored in OSS, consisting of a key, metadata, and data. Objects are accessed via HTTP or HTTPS using the bucket endpoint.

A tier that balances cost and access latency for objects, such as Standard, Infrequent Access, Archive, and Cold Archive.

A policy that automatically transitions objects to cheaper storage classes or deletes them after a specified period, helping control storage cost.

A shared file storage service that multiple ECS instances can mount simultaneously using NFS or SMB protocols. It scales capacity and performance elastically.

Disk volumes attached to ECS instances, such as ESSD, SSD, and ultra disks. They provide low-latency block-level access for operating systems and databases.

A point-in-time backup of a block storage disk. Snapshots can be used to restore disks, create images, or replicate data across zones.

A backup service for on-premises and cloud data, supporting files, databases, and virtual machines. It centralizes backup policies and restores across environments.

A managed relational database service supporting MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB. It automates backup, patching, and high availability.

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. It separates compute from storage and provides fast scaling and high performance.

A replica of a primary database that serves read traffic, offloading the primary and improving read scalability. It is available in RDS and PolarDB.

A managed in-memory key-value store compatible with Redis. It provides sub-millisecond latency for caching, session management, and real-time analytics.

A managed document database compatible with MongoDB. It offers replica sets and sharded clusters with automated backup and monitoring.

An identity created within an Alibaba Cloud account that has its own credentials and permissions. It is used to grant least-privilege access to people or applications.

An identity that can be assumed by trusted entities, such as ECS instances or other accounts, to obtain temporary credentials without sharing long-term keys.

A JSON document that specifies allowed or denied actions on resources. Policies are attached to users, groups, or roles to control access.

A centralized security management service that detects vulnerabilities, baseline risks, and intrusions across cloud resources and provides remediation guidance.

Web Application Firewall inspects HTTP and HTTPS traffic to block common attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting before they reach your application.

A service that scrubs malicious traffic and absorbs volumetric attacks to keep internet-facing services available. It offers basic and premium protection tiers.

A service that automatically adjusts the number of ECS instances based on demand. It uses scaling groups, scaling rules, and scheduled or dynamic policies.

A logical collection of ECS instances managed by Auto Scaling. It defines minimum, maximum, and desired capacities, and applies configuration templates to new instances.

A monitoring service that collects metrics, events, and logs for Alibaba Cloud resources and applications. It supports alarms and dashboards.

A rule that triggers notifications or automated actions when a metric crosses a threshold for a specified period. It helps detect and respond to operational issues.

An audit service that records API calls and console actions in your account. It helps with security analysis, compliance, and troubleshooting.

A billing method where you pay for resources by actual usage, such as per second or per hour. It offers flexibility without upfront commitment.

A billing method where you prepay for a resource for a fixed term, such as one month or one year, usually at a lower price than pay-as-you-go.

A discount plan that commits to a certain amount of hourly spend for a term in exchange for lower prices on eligible compute resources.