Getting Started with Alibaba Cloud

Welcome to Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud (also known as Aliyun) is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group and the largest cloud provider in Asia-Pacific. Founded in 2009, Alibaba Cloud was built to power Alibaba's massive e-commerce ecosystem — handling the infrastructure behind Taobao, Tmall, Alipay, and the legendary Singles' Day shopping festival that processes hundreds of billions of RMB in transactions within 24 hours. Today, Alibaba Cloud serves millions of customers across more than 200 countries and regions, offering over 200 products and services spanning compute, storage, networking, databases, AI, security, and big data analytics.

What makes Alibaba Cloud unique is its battle-tested infrastructure. The platform has been stress-tested at scales that few other cloud providers experience — the 2023 Singles' Day event peaked at 583,000 orders per second, all running on Alibaba Cloud infrastructure. This experience has produced services like Apsara, Alibaba's proprietary distributed operating system that underpins the entire cloud platform, and PolarDB, a cloud-native database that delivers six times the performance of MySQL at a fraction of the cost. For organizations operating in or expanding into the Asia-Pacific region, Alibaba Cloud provides unmatched regional coverage with 30 regions and 89 availability zones.

This guide walks you through creating your Alibaba Cloud account, understanding the console and resource organization, deploying your first resources, and getting familiar with the Alibaba Cloud CLI. Every step includes console instructions and CLI commands so you can follow along with your preferred workflow.

Creating Your Alibaba Cloud Account

To create an Alibaba Cloud account, navigate to alibabacloud.com and click "Free Account" or "Get Started for Free." You can register using an email address, phone number, or through third-party authentication with your Google, GitHub, or Apple account. International users should use the international portal at alibabacloud.com, while users in mainland China use aliyun.com — the two portals serve different regions and have different compliance requirements.

After registration, you will need to complete identity verification. For individual accounts, this typically requires a valid government-issued ID. For enterprise accounts, you will need business registration documents. Identity verification unlocks the full catalog of services and removes resource limitations that apply to unverified accounts.

Account Types and Billing

Alibaba Cloud offers two primary billing models for most services:

• Pay-As-You-Go (PostPaid): Pay only for the resources you consume, billed by the hour or second depending on the service. No upfront commitment required. Ideal for development, testing, and workloads with unpredictable usage patterns. Resources can be created and released at any time.
• Subscription (PrePaid): Commit to 1-month, 3-month, 6-month, 1-year, 2-year, or 3-year terms in exchange for significant discounts — typically 30-60% compared to Pay-As-You-Go pricing. Best for production workloads with predictable resource requirements. Subscription resources cannot be released early (though some services support downgrades).

Additionally, Alibaba Cloud offers Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for compute workloads, providing flexibility to change instance types while maintaining discounted pricing. Preemptible instances (similar to AWS Spot Instances) offer up to 90% discounts for fault-tolerant workloads.

Understanding the Alibaba Cloud Console

The Alibaba Cloud console is your primary interface for managing cloud resources. Upon logging in, you will see the console home page with quick links to frequently used services, billing summaries, and resource dashboards. The left sidebar organizes services into categories: Compute, Storage, Networking, Database, Security, and more.

Key areas of the console to familiarize yourself with include:

• Resource Management: Access your resources organized by region. Use the region selector in the top navigation bar to switch between regions. Resources are region-specific — an ECS instance in cn-hangzhou is not visible when you are viewing cn-beijing.
• RAM Console: Manage users, groups, roles, and policies through the Resource Access Management (RAM) console. This is where you create sub-accounts, assign permissions, and configure multi-factor authentication.
• Billing Management: View your current spending, set budget alerts, download invoices, and manage payment methods. The cost analysis dashboard provides breakdowns by service, region, and resource tag.
• CloudMonitor: View metrics, configure alerts, and monitor the health of your resources from a centralized monitoring dashboard.

Installing the Alibaba Cloud CLI

The Alibaba Cloud CLI (aliyun CLI) provides command-line access to all Alibaba Cloud services. Install it using your preferred package manager:

# macOS (Homebrew)
brew install aliyun-cli

# Linux (download binary)
curl -o aliyun-cli-linux.tgz https://aliyuncli.alicdn.com/aliyun-cli-linux-latest-amd64.tgz
tar -xzf aliyun-cli-linux.tgz
sudo mv aliyun /usr/local/bin/

# Windows (Scoop)
scoop install aliyun-cli

# Verify installation
aliyun version

Configuring CLI Authentication

After installation, configure the CLI with your AccessKey credentials:

# Interactive configuration
aliyun configure

# You will be prompted for:
# - Access Key ID: Your RAM user AccessKey ID
# - Access Key Secret: Your RAM user AccessKey secret
# - Default Region Id: e.g., cn-hangzhou, ap-southeast-1, us-west-1
# - Default Language: en (English) or zh (Chinese)

# Alternatively, configure with a named profile
aliyun configure --profile prod --mode AK \
  --access-key-id LTAI5t**** \
  --access-key-secret ****

# List configured profiles
aliyun configure list

Deploying Your First ECS Instance

Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is Alibaba Cloud's primary compute service, equivalent to AWS EC2 or Azure Virtual Machines. Let us create a basic ECS instance to get started:

# List available regions
aliyun ecs DescribeRegions --output cols=RegionId,LocalName

# List available instance types in your region
aliyun ecs DescribeInstanceTypes \
  --InstanceTypeFamily ecs.g7 \
  --output cols=InstanceTypeId,CpuCoreCount,MemorySize

# Create a VPC first
aliyun vpc CreateVpc \
  --VpcName "my-first-vpc" \
  --CidrBlock "10.0.0.0/16" \
  --RegionId cn-hangzhou

# Create a vSwitch (subnet)
aliyun vpc CreateVSwitch \
  --VpcId vpc-bp1**** \
  --VSwitchName "my-first-vswitch" \
  --CidrBlock "10.0.1.0/24" \
  --ZoneId cn-hangzhou-a

# Create a security group
aliyun ecs CreateSecurityGroup \
  --SecurityGroupName "my-first-sg" \
  --VpcId vpc-bp1****

# Add SSH rule to security group
aliyun ecs AuthorizeSecurityGroup \
  --SecurityGroupId sg-bp1**** \
  --IpProtocol tcp \
  --PortRange 22/22 \
  --SourceCidrIp 0.0.0.0/0

# Create the ECS instance
aliyun ecs CreateInstance \
  --InstanceName "my-first-ecs" \
  --InstanceType ecs.g7.large \
  --ImageId ubuntu_22_04_x64_20G_alibase \
  --VSwitchId vsw-bp1**** \
  --SecurityGroupId sg-bp1**** \
  --SystemDisk.Category cloud_essd \
  --SystemDisk.Size 40 \
  --InternetMaxBandwidthOut 5

Regions and Availability Zones

Alibaba Cloud operates 30 regions worldwide with 89 availability zones. Each region is an independent geographic area, and each availability zone is an isolated data center within a region with independent power, cooling, and networking. Key regions include:

• China: cn-hangzhou, cn-shanghai, cn-beijing, cn-shenzhen, cn-guangzhou, cn-chengdu, cn-zhangjiakou, cn-huhehaote, cn-wulanchabu, cn-heyuan
• Asia Pacific: ap-southeast-1 (Singapore), ap-southeast-2 (Sydney), ap-southeast-3 (Kuala Lumpur), ap-southeast-5 (Jakarta), ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo), ap-south-1 (Mumbai)
• Americas: us-west-1 (Silicon Valley), us-east-1 (Virginia)
• Europe: eu-central-1 (Frankfurt), eu-west-1 (London)
• Middle East: me-east-1 (Dubai), me-central-1 (Riyadh)

When choosing a region, consider data residency requirements, latency to your users, service availability (not all services are available in all regions), and pricing differences between regions. China regions require ICP (Internet Content Provider) licensing for public-facing websites and applications.

Resource Organization with Resource Groups

Alibaba Cloud uses Resource Groups to organize and manage resources across your account. Resource Groups function similarly to AWS Resource Groups or Azure Resource Groups — they provide logical containers for grouping related resources for access control, billing, and management purposes.

# Create a resource group
aliyun resourcemanager CreateResourceGroup \
  --DisplayName "Production" \
  --Name "prod-rg"

# List resource groups
aliyun resourcemanager ListResourceGroups

# Move a resource to a resource group
aliyun resourcemanager MoveResources \
  --ResourceGroupId rg-**** \
  --Resources '[{"ResourceId":"i-bp1****","ResourceType":"instance","Service":"ecs"}]'

For enterprise accounts with multiple teams or business units, consider using Alibaba Cloud Resource Directory to create a multi-account structure. Resource Directory provides a hierarchical organization with folders and member accounts, similar to AWS Organizations. You can apply Service Control Policies (SCPs) at the folder or account level to enforce governance guardrails across your organization.

Essential Services Overview

Before diving deeper into individual services, here is a quick overview of the core Alibaba Cloud services you will encounter most frequently:

• ECS (Elastic Compute Service): Virtual machines with a wide range of instance families — general purpose (g-series), compute optimized (c-series), memory optimized (r-series), GPU-accelerated (gn-series), and bare metal instances.
• OSS (Object Storage Service): Scalable object storage with Standard, Infrequent Access, Archive, and Cold Archive tiers. Supports lifecycle policies, cross-region replication, and CDN integration.
• VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): Isolated network environments with vSwitches (subnets), NAT gateways, route tables, and security groups. Supports VPN Gateway and Express Connect for hybrid connectivity.
• ApsaraDB RDS: Managed relational databases supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MariaDB with automatic backups, read replicas, and high availability.
• PolarDB: Cloud-native database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle with up to 128 TB storage and serverless scaling.
• ACK (Container Service for Kubernetes): Managed Kubernetes with automatic upgrades, node pool management, and deep integration with Alibaba Cloud services.
• Function Compute: Serverless compute platform supporting multiple runtimes with event-driven triggers from OSS, API Gateway, and Message Queue.
• SLS (Simple Log Service): Log collection, analysis, and visualization platform with SQL-based queries and alerting capabilities.
• RAM (Resource Access Management): Identity and access management with users, groups, roles, and fine-grained policies.
• CloudMonitor: Infrastructure and application monitoring with metric collection, alerting, and dashboard visualization.

Tagging Resources

Consistent resource tagging is essential for cost allocation, access control, and operational management. Alibaba Cloud supports tags on most resources, and you should establish a tagging strategy early:

# Tag an ECS instance
aliyun ecs AddTags \
  --ResourceType instance \
  --ResourceId i-bp1**** \
  --Tag.1.Key Environment \
  --Tag.1.Value production \
  --Tag.2.Key Team \
  --Tag.2.Value platform \
  --Tag.3.Key CostCenter \
  --Tag.3.Value CC-1234

# Query resources by tag
aliyun ecs DescribeInstances \
  --Tag.1.Key Environment \
  --Tag.1.Value production

Use Tag Policy in Resource Directory to enforce mandatory tags across your organization. Tag policies can require specific tag keys on resource creation and validate tag values against allowed patterns or lists.

Next Steps

Now that you have your Alibaba Cloud account set up and understand the basics of the console, CLI, and resource organization, here are recommended next steps for deepening your knowledge:

• Set up RAM users and policies for team members — never share root account credentials
• Create a VPC with multi-zone vSwitches for high availability
• Deploy an ECS instance and connect via SSH or the VNC console
• Create an OSS bucket and experiment with storage classes and lifecycle rules
• Set up CloudMonitor alerts for your first resources
• Enable ActionTrail for API audit logging across your account
• Explore the Terraform Alibaba Cloud Provider for infrastructure as code