Alibaba Cloud: From Zero to Hero - The Complete Guide

Explore cloud service models—infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service—through a pizza analogy. Apply these models to real-world use cases like development and testing, web hosting, disaster recovery for IaaS; app development with PaaS; and ready-made tools in SaaS.

Explore public, private, and hybrid cloud deployment models, their advantages and disadvantages, including scalability, cost, control, security, and data movement considerations.

Understand a cloud provider’s global infrastructure by exploring regions and zones, their interconnections, and how regional and zonal placement affects latency, availability, and regulatory compliance.

Discover Alibaba Cloud's global infrastructure with 30 regions and 89 availability zones across international and mainland China regions, featuring expansions to Thailand, Philippines, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Wuhan.

Explore Alibaba Cloud elastic compute service and virtual machines, focusing on scalable infrastructure, regions, security groups, private networks, and pay-as-you-go versus reserved pricing.

Learn how Alibaba Cloud ECS cloud disks provide block storage with high redundancy and 99.9999999% reliability, plus snapshots and images for backups, blueprints, and rapid deployment.

Explore Alibaba Cloud ECS instances for scalable website hosting with high‑performance SSDs and Apache or Nginx, big data processing with Hadoop, Spark, or Flink, plus development and testing with snapshots.

Explore Alibaba Cloud SLB, a fully managed load balancer that distributes traffic across back-end servers for reliability, scalability, and security, with autoscaling, health checks, and ALB, NLB, and CLB options.

Learn how auto scaling on Alibaba Cloud automatically adapts resources to demand with elastic scale up, scale down, and self-healing, reducing costs from under- or over-provisioning.

Explore Alibaba Cloud auto scaling components, including scaling group, cooldown period, scaling configuration, rules, activities, and trigger tasks, and learn to set minimum and maximum capacities.

Explore autoscaling for web apps, batch processing, and containerized microservices, using policies based on cpu or custom metrics to handle traffic surges, idle periods, and efficient resource use.

Discover Alibaba Cloud's container service for Kubernetes (ACK), a managed platform that deploys, manages, and scales containerized apps with automatically scalable clusters, multi-zone high availability, and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Explore three ACK types: managed, dedicated, and serverless clusters and compare their use for multi-tenant cost efficiency, isolated resources for security and performance, and event-driven pay-per-use workloads.

Explore the Kubernetes architecture by examining the master node and worker nodes, detailing components like the API server, kube scheduler, controller manager, etcd, kubelet, kube proxy, container runtime, and pods.

Discover Alibaba Cloud scenarios: web app deployment with automatic scaling on a managed Kubernetes environment, microservices with orchestration and monitoring, and hybrid cloud deployment across on premise and cloud.

Explore Alibaba Cloud's container registry (ECR) for secure, scalable image storage and deployment of Docker images with encryption, access control, vulnerability scanning, and multi-region replication.

Explore Alibaba Cloud's virtual private cloud, a private, isolated network you control with subnets, switches, routers, route tables, and elastic IPs; learn hybrid connectivity, IPv4/IPv6 support, and NAT gateway basics.

Learn Alibaba Cloud VPC connections, including internet access options, cross-VPC links, and on-premises connectivity with Express Connect, SAG, VPN, and CDN for global reach.

Learn to create a virtual private cloud in Alibaba Cloud, name the VPC, choose a non-overlapping IPv4 CIDR block, and configure switches and the default route table.

Master VPC security by using security groups as instance firewalls and knuckles as subnet controls, noting stateful vs stateless rules, traffic evaluation, and public IP considerations.

Explore three common scenarios where VPC enables secure web apps with private subnets and security controls, supports hybrid cloud connectivity via peering and VPN gateway, and enables multi-region high availability.

Explore Alibaba Cloud's fully managed relational database service, RDS, supporting MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB. Enjoy high availability, automatic failover, and scalable storage and memory.

Explore Alibaba Cloud RDS features, including automatic and manual backups with data and log retention, read-only instances, and recovery options such as master node rollback, slave repair, and temporary instances.

Explore rds security with a three-level defense—anti-ddos integration, ip whitelisting up to 1000 addresses, and protection from sql injection and other database threats—plus real-time monitoring of cpu, iops, and connections.

Explore three common RDS scenarios for web apps, analytics, and enterprise workloads, emphasizing scalable resources, security features, read replicas, and automatic failover.

Explore Alibaba Cloud's object storage service (OSS), its bucket and object model with metadata, and how lifecycle management, storage classes, and cross-region replication across availability zones ensure scalable, durable data.

Learn how Alibaba Cloud IMG enables efficient image processing on OSS images, including format conversion, resizing, cropping, rotating, watermarking, and color effects via x-oss-process.

Explore the Alibaba Cloud image service within OSS by uploading an object to a bucket, retrieving its URL, and applying on-the-fly image processing with resize parameters like w_200.

Compare static and dynamic websites and learn to host a static site on Alibaba Cloud OSS using a bucket and optional custom domain.

Create an Alibaba Cloud OSS bucket in Germany, upload index.html, enable static website hosting, and make it public read to serve the page.

Learn how Alibaba Cloud OSS secures data with server-side and client-side encryption, transmission encryption, access controls like ACL, RAM policy and bucket policy, and logging via Cloud Monitor.

Explore oss scenarios for Alibaba Cloud, including data backup and archiving with durability. Cover static website hosting with cdn delivery and support data intensive applications on unstructured data.

Learn how content delivery networks use global edge servers to cache content, reduce latency, and boost reliability with Alibaba Cloud CDN's accelerated domain and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Alibaba Cloud CDN accelerates site delivery with edge locations to reduce latency and handle traffic spikes, enables secure global software distribution and high-quality live or on-demand streaming.