Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is suitable for a wide range of scenarios. You can use ECS as a standalone web server or application server, or integrate it with other Alibaba Cloud services to create powerful solutions.
The scenarios described in this topic are not exhaustive. As you use ECS, you will discover additional benefits of cloud computing.
Website applications
For new websites with low traffic, a single, low-configuration ECS instance is sufficient to run web applications, such as Apache or Nginx, databases, and file storage. As your website grows, you can upgrade the instance configuration or add more ECS instances to prevent resource shortages during traffic surges.
E-commerce websites
Applications such as e-commerce platforms, ticket booking websites, and promotional campaigns often experience large and sudden traffic fluctuations. You can use Auto Scaling to automatically add ECS instances during peak hours and remove them during off-peak hours. This approach ensures that resource demands are met while improving cost-effectiveness. You can also use Auto Scaling with Server Load Balancer (SLB) to build a high-availability (HA) application architecture. For more information, see Auto Scaling and Server Load Balancer.
Data analytics
ECS provides big data instance families that support business scenarios such as Hadoop distributed computing, log processing, and large data warehouses. These instances use a local storage architecture that provides high network performance for cloud-based Hadoop and Spark clusters, and ensures mass storage space with high storage performance. For more information, see Big data instance families.
Graphics rendering
GPU-accelerated instances provide excellent computing power, allowing you to render images in real-time within seconds. They are widely used in scenarios such as graphics rendering, cloud graphics workstation services, and video transcoding.
Instances such as vgn6i and gn6i use NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU accelerators based on the Turing microarchitecture to deliver excellent graphics computing capabilities. The vgn6i instances are vGPU-accelerated instances that provide virtual GPUs created through sharding virtualization. These instances support 1/2, 1/4, or 1/8 of the computing power of a T4 GPU and provide excellent 3D image rendering capabilities.
Deep learning
You can use GPU-accelerated instances for deep learning scenarios that require continuous and intensive artificial neural network computations. These instances provide excellent performance and significant cost savings. In addition, GPU-accelerated compute-optimized instances reduce the computing requirements on the client side. This makes them suitable for thin client scenarios such as image editing and real-time cloud rendering for games, AR, or VR. For more information, see Overview of GPU-accelerated compute-optimized and vGPU-accelerated instances.
High-performance computing
High-performance computing (HPC) is used for large-scale scientific computing, parallel computing, and simulation in fields such as weather forecasting, biopharmaceuticals, gene sequencing, and image editing.
You can use Elastic High Performance Computing (E-HPC). E-HPC aggregates computing power and uses parallel computing to solve large-scale scientific, engineering, and business problems.
More use cases
For more ECS use cases, see ECS Customer Use Cases.