Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of Elastic Container Instance (ECI) at The Computing Conference 2018, helping developers run containers without managing servers.

By Qi Li

Container technology is a revolutionary concept aimed at simplifying software distribution and deployment by introducing standardized units known as "containers". Container technology is acknowledged as a great option to decrease the cost of software operations and development. However, to deploy containers on the cloud, you still have to think about the cloud servers, storage, and networking for your services. Additionally, you have to manually deploy, manage, and maintain the cloud servers, making the entire software development cycle challenging.

Enterprises demand for a quick and convenient way to deploy applications without caring about these problems. To tackle these issues, Alibaba Cloud has launched a new product called Elastic Container Instance (ECI) at The Computing Conference 2018. With ECI, developers can they enjoy the convenience of containers without the need to manage ECS instances.

What Is Alibaba Cloud ECI

Alibaba Cloud Elastic Container Instance (ECI) is an agile, secure, and serverless container service that allows you to run containers without managing servers. It is extremely easy-to-use; you can create clusters in just five seconds and deploy an application within 30 seconds! ECI is billed based on the running time and the actual usage of resources.

Why Alibaba Cloud ECI

Serverless Containers

With ECI, you can focus on business development and innovation without the need to create clusters and manage the infrastructure.

Flexible Deployment

Containers can be created and automatically scaled up within seconds during traffic spikes.

Community Compatibility

ECI works with Kubernetes clusters through Virtual Kubelet.

Service Integration

You can integrate other Alibaba Cloud services onto ECI, such as VPC, Log Service, and CloudMonitor.

How It Works

Automated DevOps Continuous Delivery

ECI is able to automatically complete container deployment, and accelerate testing case execution and sandbox environment establishment. It also supports automation and up-scaling without the need to create and maintain clusters. You can create and delete containers at any time.

Automatically Scales Up Compute Capacity during Traffic Spikes

ECI is able to automatically provision additional compute resources for your business to avoid system failures during traffic spikes and prevent resource waste due to excessive resource provisioning.

Handles Large Amounts of Online Data Processing Tasks

Based on business data processing needs, ECI can create a large number of nodes in a short period of time to handle big data and online AI requests.

Serverless Container Infrastructure

The container infrastructure is serverless and event-driven. It is capable of cost-effectively handling highly concurrent container instance schedules and events.

Try Alibaba Cloud Elastic Container Instance for Free

Currently, Alibaba Cloud ECI is in Beta release and is free to use. Supported regions are Hangzhou-G, Beijing-E, Shanghai-D, and USWest-B. Try it for free now!

To learn more about Alibaba Cloud Elastic Container Instance (ECI), visit the official product page at www.alibabacloud.com/products/elastic-container-instance.