Alibaba Cloud (Elastic Compute Service)

Platform

Products

name: Enterprise-level general-purpose, compute-, memory-, storage- and network-optimized ECS virtual machines; category: virtual_machine; cpu isolation: guaranteed; description: Current enterprise-level x86 instance families expose stable compute performance from dedicated CPU and memory resources while the physical server remains managed by Alibaba Cloud; generation, processor and regional availability vary by family., name: Shared e instance family; category: shared_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: shared; description: Low-cost instances whose vCPUs are non-dedicated hyperthreads randomly scheduled onto idle CPU resources. Alibaba Cloud does not guarantee stable compute performance for this family., name: Burstable t6 instance family; category: burstable_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: shared; description: Shared instances with a size-specific CPU-credit baseline and burst capacity. Standard mode is the default; unlimited mode can sustain higher utilization but may add surplus-credit charges., name: Arm-based ECS virtual machines; category: arm_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: guaranteed; description: Enterprise-level Arm instance families for compatible cloud-native, web, application and data workloads; exact family and region availability vary., name: GPU and accelerator ECS virtual machines; category: gpu_and_accelerator_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: guaranteed; description: GPU-accelerated families for AI, inference, graphics, video and scientific workloads, with accelerator and region availability varying by family., name: Super Computing Cluster and HPC instances; category: hpc_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: guaranteed; description: High-performance compute options with low-latency RDMA networking for tightly coupled scientific, engineering and AI workloads., name: ECS Spot Instances; category: interruptible_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: depends_on_instance_type; description: Discounted spare ECS capacity, advertised at up to 90% below pay-as-you-go rates, that can be reclaimed for price or capacity reasons after a release notice., name: Elastic Bare Metal Instances; category: bare_metal_compute; cpu isolation: dedicated; description: Physical-server performance and isolation combined with ECS provisioning and VPC integration, using Alibaba Cloud's self-developed Virtualization 2.0 architecture., name: Dedicated Hosts; category: dedicated_virtual_machine_host; cpu isolation: dedicated; description: A physical host dedicated to one account for placement, compliance and bring-your-own-license requirements; supported ECS instance families can be deployed on the host.

Operating systems

Alibaba Cloud Linux 2, 3 and 4 public images on compatible x86 or Arm instance types, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS and 26.04 LTS public images on compatible architectures, Debian 12.13 and 13.5 public images on compatible x86 or Arm instance types, Anolis OS, CentOS Stream, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Fedora variants and FreeBSD public or Marketplace images where compatible, Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2025 images on compatible x86 instance types, custom Linux and Windows images imported in RAW, VHD, QCOW2 or VMDK format, subject to the documented compatibility requirements

Virtualization

Alibaba Cloud's ECS portfolio has used Xen for legacy instance families, KVM for later generations, and the proprietary SHENLONG architecture for current supported families, Elastic Bare Metal Instances use Alibaba Cloud's self-developed Virtualization 2.0 architecture while exposing direct physical CPU and memory resources, The current official e, t6 and u2a family pages do not disclose an exact guest hypervisor for the benchmark instance types

CPU isolation

The shared e family uses non-dedicated hyperthreads randomly scheduled onto idle CPU resources and has no stable compute-performance guarantee, The t6 family shares CPU capacity and uses credits; ecs.t6-c4m1.large has a 5% baseline per vCPU, earns six credits per hour across the instance and can hold 144 credits, The enterprise-level u2a family uses dedicated CPU and memory resources for stable performance; each vCPU is a processor hyperthread, Dedicated Hosts and Elastic Bare Metal Instances provide single-customer physical-host or physical-server isolation

Features

• App installation name: Alibaba Cloud Marketplace images; artifacts: operating-system images, application images, development-stack images, control-panel images, container-oriented images; capabilities: choose from more than 2,000 Marketplace images described by Alibaba Cloud, launch eligible .NET, PHP, Java, LAMP, Docker, web-builder and control-panel stacks through an ECS image workflow, install arbitrary compatible software with administrator access inside an ECS guest
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• Templates & images types: Alibaba Cloud public, Marketplace, custom, shared and community images, reusable custom images created from instances or snapshots and imported third-party images, Resource Orchestration Service JSON, YAML and Terraform templates and stacks, Image Builder and Operation Orchestration Service image pipelines, including Packer-compatible workflows, cloud-init or AliyunInit first-boot initialization; interfaces: Alibaba Cloud console, OpenAPI, Alibaba Cloud CLI, SDKs, Terraform provider, Resource Orchestration Service, Operation Orchestration Service
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• Network orchestration interfaces and tooling: Alibaba Cloud console, OpenAPI, Alibaba Cloud CLI, SDKs, Terraform provider, Resource Orchestration Service; services: IPv4 and IPv6 Virtual Private Clouds with vSwitch subnets, route tables, gateways and elastic network interfaces, NAT Gateway, VPN Gateway, Express Connect, VPC peering and Cloud Enterprise Network connectivity, Auto Scaling groups with health replacement, fixed, scheduled, metric-driven and custom scaling policies, regional, zone and deployment-set placement controls where supported, Container Service for Kubernetes managed, serverless, edge and registered-cluster options with ECS worker nodes
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• Firewall services: name: ECS security groups; scope: stateful virtual-firewall ingress and egress rules applied to associated ECS network interfaces, name: Cloud Firewall; scope: centralized Internet, NAT, VPC and ECS traffic control and intrusion prevention through separately configured firewall capabilities; controls: allow or deny action, priority, protocol, source or destination CIDR or security group, port or port range
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• Load balancer services: Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, Classic Load Balancer; types: public, private; capabilities: Layer 7 HTTP and HTTPS request distribution and content-based routing through Application Load Balancer, high-throughput Layer 4 TCP, UDP and TCPSSL traffic distribution through Network Load Balancer, TCP, UDP, HTTP and HTTPS listeners through Classic Load Balancer, backend server groups, health checks and supported cross-zone or multi-zone high availability, integration with ECS, elastic container and autoscaling backends where supported
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• DNS management name: Alibaba Cloud DNS and Alibaba Cloud Domains; capabilities: public authoritative DNS zones and records, PrivateZone private DNS and resolver capabilities, intelligent traffic management and health-aware resolution where configured, domain search, registration, management, renewal and eligible inbound transfer through Alibaba Cloud Domains; domain registration: status: offered; service: Alibaba Cloud Domains; capabilities: register supported domains, manage registrations, renew domains, transfer eligible domains to Alibaba Cloud
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• Git integrations services: Alibaba Cloud DevOps Codeup, Alibaba Cloud DevOps Flow; providers: Codeup, generic Git, GitHub, GitLab, self-managed GitLab, Bitbucket Cloud; capabilities: host source code in Codeup repositories, connect supported external Git repositories as pipeline sources, trigger pipelines from pushes, tags or merge and pull requests where the selected provider supports the event, use Alibaba Cloud Container Registry repositories as eligible pipeline sources
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• Container registry providers: Alibaba Cloud Container Registry, Docker and OCI-compatible client tooling, Docker Hub, Google Container Registry, Quay and supported custom registries; capabilities: public or private Docker and OCI image and artifact repositories, Docker CLI login, push and pull workflows, Helm and multi-architecture artifact handling where supported, image replication, scanning and signing in supported Container Registry editions, source-driven image builds from Codeup, GitHub, GitLab, generic Git and Gitee, deploy registry images to Container Service for Kubernetes clusters
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