¶ Alibaba Cloud
¶ Dev Ops
Introduction to Alibaba Cloud in the DevOps Landscape: A Journey Into Automation, Scalability, and Cloud-Native Engineering
There’s a moment in every engineer’s journey when the world of cloud computing stops being a buzzword-filled backdrop and becomes something real, something tangible, something that fundamentally reshapes how software is built, deployed, and maintained. For many people in Asia and an increasingly large part of the global tech ecosystem, that moment is often tied to Alibaba Cloud. It’s a platform that grew out of one of the most operationally demanding environments on the planet, and it carries with it the ethos, discipline, and scale of a company engineered to handle massive global commerce, billions of requests, and unpredictable peaks that would make most infrastructure tremble.
This course of 100 articles is meant to take you deep into that world — not through textbook-style concepts or generic DevOps theory, but through an exploration of Alibaba Cloud as a living, evolving platform that supports real engineering teams building real systems. Alibaba Cloud is one of those technologies that becomes more interesting the more you peel back the layers. At first glance, it seems like another cloud provider with a familiar menu of compute, storage, and networking services. But as you go deeper, you find a very different DNA, a culture shaped by years of operating at near-unimaginable scale, and a set of tools that bring their own flavor to the DevOps world.
What makes Alibaba Cloud so compelling from a DevOps perspective is not just its size or its global reach. It’s the philosophy behind its services, the patterns it encourages, and the way it blends automation, reliability engineering, security, orchestration, and cloud-native thinking into a cohesive ecosystem. When you learn DevOps through the lens of Alibaba Cloud, you’re not just learning how to run applications; you’re learning how to prepare systems for the chaotic, unpredictable, always-online nature of real-world workloads.
The story of Alibaba Cloud is closely tied to the story of Alibaba itself — a company that grew from startup to global giant at a pace few organizations have experienced. The early infrastructure challenges were immense: shopping festivals that generated unprecedented traffic spikes, data centers that needed to scale fast, systems that couldn’t afford downtime even for a moment. Alibaba’s internal engineering teams solved these challenges not by patching problems but by rethinking architecture entirely. Over time, that engineering culture crystallized into a cloud platform that carries those lessons forward. What we know today as Alibaba Cloud is not just an offering to the outside world; it’s the externalization of one of the most sophisticated, resilient engineering ecosystems ever built in the commercial world.
As you spend time with Alibaba Cloud, you start to notice that this platform thinks differently. It was forged in environments where elasticity wasn’t a bonus but a survival tactic, where automated scaling wasn’t a convenience but a fundamental requirement. You’ll see this mindset reflected in its services, from Elastic Compute Service instances that adapt smoothly to workload changes, to Serverless Kubernetes offerings that expand and contract as naturally as breathing, to load balancers designed with global commerce traffic in mind. Alibaba Cloud tends to assume that your applications will face real pressure — sudden spikes, network constraints, uneven loads — and provides tools that keep things running even when the unexpected happens.
This course will help you understand not just the tools, but the philosophy behind them. DevOps is often described as a blend of culture, automation, and continuous delivery, and Alibaba Cloud embodies those principles deeply. You’ll encounter services that encourage good habits like infrastructure as code, observability, fault isolation, and automated recovery. You’ll find that many of Alibaba Cloud’s features nudge you toward building systems that heal themselves, adapt dynamically, and embrace cloud-native patterns. These aren’t just tools for convenience; they are reflections of the internal engineering practices that allowed Alibaba to operate at global e-commerce scale.
One of the most eye-opening aspects of Alibaba Cloud is how it handles orchestration and containerized workloads. Containers and Kubernetes are now essential in the DevOps world, and Alibaba Cloud offers a mature, deeply integrated platform for both. Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) is a great example of this philosophy. On the surface, it behaves like a managed Kubernetes service. But beneath that surface, it integrates seamlessly with network policies, auto-scaling systems, observability stacks, security services, and cross-region capabilities. When you deploy applications on ACK, you feel like you’re entering a world where Kubernetes isn’t an add-on — it’s a native citizen of the platform.
But the real beauty of working with Alibaba Cloud as a DevOps engineer is how it handles the lifecycle of applications. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are baked into the ecosystem in ways that feel natural. Tools like Cloud Toolkit, Cloud Shell, and CodePipeline help you automate everything from development workflows to production rollouts. Once you begin to use these tools, you start to appreciate how deeply Alibaba Cloud embraces automation. Manual operations feel almost out of place, not because the platform restricts you, but because automation becomes the obvious path forward.
Observability is another area where Alibaba Cloud shines. Complex systems need visibility — logs, traces, metrics, alarms — and the platform gives you a suite of tools that turn system behavior into something you can observe, reason about, and control. CloudMonitor, Application Real-Time Monitoring Service, Log Service, and Distributed Tracing all blend into a unified view of your system’s health. In the world of DevOps, where detection, diagnosis, and response form the backbone of reliability engineering, this integrated observability layer becomes invaluable.
Security, often treated as an afterthought in beginner DevOps discussions, takes center stage in Alibaba Cloud. You’ll find that identity management, access control, encryption, compliance, and network boundaries are treated with a seriousness that reflects the realities of enterprise-grade systems. Resource Access Management (RAM) gives you fine-grained control over permissions. Virtual Private Cloud architecture encourages isolation, segmentation, and layered protection. The platform supports zero-trust principles, multi-factor authentication, key management, and automated threat detection. As you move through the course, you’ll find that building secure systems on Alibaba Cloud doesn’t require extraordinary effort — the platform nudges you toward secure defaults from the beginning.
A major theme throughout this course will be understanding how DevOps practices evolve in cloud-native environments. Traditional methods that worked in data centers don’t always translate well to the cloud, where systems shift dynamically, hardware becomes abstracted, and automation is not a luxury but a necessity. On Alibaba Cloud, DevOps feels less like a methodology and more like a mode of thinking. You learn to expect change, prepare for scaling events, design for failure, and deliver continuously. The platform encourages these habits through its design, its services, and its interoperability.
Alibaba Cloud also plays a crucial role in the global cloud ecosystem. While it is especially dominant in Asia, it operates data centers around the world and powers applications for companies in retail, logistics, finance, gaming, media, communication, and technology. Understanding Alibaba Cloud opens doors not only to mastering a cloud provider but to appreciating how cultural and regional contexts influence the evolution of technology. You’ll see how the platform supports global workloads while maintaining core principles shaped by its origins.
Over the course of these 100 articles, we will explore the many layers that make up Alibaba Cloud from a DevOps perspective. We’ll look at compute, networking, and storage. We’ll explore containers, automation, CI/CD pipelines, observability, serverless computing, distributed systems, and governance. We’ll talk about cost optimization, global scaling, disaster recovery, hybrid setups, and how teams operate with confidence in environments where change is constant. But more than that, we’ll uncover how the platform’s foundations — its architecture, its philosophy, its engineering culture — influence the daily life of anyone building on it.
By the end of this journey, Alibaba Cloud will no longer feel like just another cloud option. It will feel like a distinct ecosystem with its own strengths, personality, and way of thinking. You’ll understand how its services work together, how they shape your DevOps workflow, and how they prepare your applications to run at scale in real-world environments. You’ll walk away not only with practical skills but with a deeper appreciation of distributed systems, automation, and the craft of building resilient infrastructure.
This course is meant to be engaging, immersive, and practical. It’s for anyone curious about cloud-native engineering, passionate about automation, or simply eager to expand their DevOps horizons. If you’re ready to dive into a platform that blends global reach with an engineering culture forged in some of the most demanding environments in the world, then let’s begin this journey into Alibaba Cloud — a world where automation becomes instinct, scalability becomes second nature, and DevOps evolves from a practice into a way of building.
¶ Alibaba Cloud
¶ Beginner Level
1. Introduction to DevOps and Alibaba Cloud
2. What is Cloud Computing? An Overview
3. Setting Up Your Alibaba Cloud Account and Console
4. Understanding Alibaba Cloud's Key Services for DevOps
5. Introduction to Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
6. How to Use Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS)
7. Exploring Alibaba Cloud Container Service (ACK)
8. Introduction to Infrastructure as Code with Alibaba Cloud
9. Understanding Networking in Alibaba Cloud (VPC, SLB, DNS)
10. Introduction to Alibaba Cloud RDS (Relational Database Service)
11. Getting Started with Alibaba Cloud Cloud Monitor
12. How to Secure Your Alibaba Cloud Environment
13. Alibaba Cloud Best Practices for Beginner DevOps Engineers
14. Introduction to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
15. Using Alibaba Cloud CLI for Basic DevOps Operations
16. Introduction to Alibaba Cloud Resource Management and Automation
17. Setting Up a Simple Web Application on Alibaba Cloud
18. Overview of Cloud Security Posture in Alibaba Cloud
19. Exploring Alibaba Cloud's Logging and Monitoring Services
20. Introduction to Alibaba Cloud's Auto Scaling Service
21. How to Create a Simple DevOps Pipeline with Alibaba Cloud
22. Understanding IAM (Identity Access Management) on Alibaba Cloud
23. Basic Load Balancing Techniques on Alibaba Cloud
24. Overview of Cloud Cost Management on Alibaba Cloud
25. Introduction to Alibaba Cloud’s Cloud Config Service
¶ Intermediate Level
26. Automating Infrastructure with Alibaba Cloud’s Terraform Integration
27. Introduction to Docker and Kubernetes on Alibaba Cloud
28. Deploying a Multi-tier Web Application with Alibaba Cloud
29. Understanding Alibaba Cloud’s Serverless Architecture
30. Advanced Networking in Alibaba Cloud (VPC Peering, Transit Gateway)
31. Using Alibaba Cloud’s Container Registry for Docker Images
32. Introduction to Microservices Architecture on Alibaba Cloud
33. How to Implement CI/CD Pipelines Using Alibaba Cloud DevOps Tools
34. Monitoring and Observability on Alibaba Cloud
35. Configuring Alibaba Cloud Security Groups for Better Security
36. Managing Logs and Metrics with Alibaba Cloud Log Service
37. Advanced Use of Alibaba Cloud Cloud Monitor for DevOps
38. Implementing Disaster Recovery with Alibaba Cloud
39. Best Practices for Data Backup and Recovery on Alibaba Cloud
40. Understanding Alibaba Cloud’s Application Delivery Controller (ADC)
41. Using Alibaba Cloud CDN for Optimized Web Performance
42. Introduction to Kubernetes on Alibaba Cloud
43. Exploring Alibaba Cloud's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Peering
44. Automated Deployment with Alibaba Cloud Elastic Container Instance (ECI)
45. Building Scalable Applications on Alibaba Cloud Using Auto Scaling
46. Integrating Alibaba Cloud with Jenkins for Advanced CI/CD
47. How to Implement Infrastructure as Code with Alibaba Cloud
48. Continuous Testing in DevOps with Alibaba Cloud
49. Automating Cloud Monitoring and Alerts in Alibaba Cloud
50. Introduction to Serverless Functions on Alibaba Cloud (FC)
51. Running Large Scale Applications on Alibaba Cloud with Kubernetes
52. Managing Secrets and Configuration with Alibaba Cloud KMS
53. Integrating Alibaba Cloud with GitHub for Automated DevOps Pipelines
54. How to Create and Manage Elastic Load Balancers on Alibaba Cloud
55. Understanding Alibaba Cloud’s Security & Compliance Framework
56. Deploying and Managing Containers with Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes Service (ACK)
57. Using Alibaba Cloud’s CloudShell for Command Line Operations
58. Continuous Delivery with Alibaba Cloud DevOps Suite
59. Multi-cloud Strategies for Alibaba Cloud DevOps Engineers
60. Exploring Alibaba Cloud Cloud Migration Tools for DevOps
¶ Advanced Level
61. Advanced Networking Concepts for DevOps in Alibaba Cloud
62. Building an Advanced CI/CD Pipeline with Alibaba Cloud Services
63. How to Achieve Zero Downtime Deployments on Alibaba Cloud
64. Advanced Auto-Scaling Techniques on Alibaba Cloud
65. Kubernetes Cluster Management at Scale on Alibaba Cloud
66. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud's ApsaraDB for Advanced Database Management
67. Building Fault-Tolerant Applications on Alibaba Cloud
68. Advanced Cloud Security Practices for DevOps on Alibaba Cloud
69. Optimizing Cost for DevOps Workloads on Alibaba Cloud
70. Implementing High Availability and Disaster Recovery Strategies
71. Optimizing Containerized Applications on Alibaba Cloud
72. Integrating Alibaba Cloud with Third-Party DevOps Tools
73. Advanced Cloud Monitoring and Incident Management on Alibaba Cloud
74. Container Security in Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes
75. Integrating Alibaba Cloud with Terraform for Complex Infrastructure Management
76. Advanced Automation Techniques with Alibaba Cloud
77. Achieving Governance and Compliance in DevOps Workflows on Alibaba Cloud
78. Securing Kubernetes Clusters on Alibaba Cloud with Network Policies
79. Continuous Deployment Strategies with Alibaba Cloud for Large-Scale Environments
80. Working with Hybrid Cloud Environments Using Alibaba Cloud
81. Mastering Infrastructure as Code with Alibaba Cloud and Terraform
82. Multi-Region and Multi-Availability Zone Deployment Strategies
83. Using Alibaba Cloud for Event-Driven Architecture in DevOps
84. Building Real-Time Applications with Alibaba Cloud Services
85. Advanced Data Pipeline Automation Using Alibaba Cloud
86. High-Performance Computing with Alibaba Cloud for DevOps
87. DevOps Automation at Scale: Alibaba Cloud and CloudFormation
88. Building Secure and Compliant DevOps Pipelines on Alibaba Cloud
89. Integrating Alibaba Cloud with Artificial Intelligence/ML for DevOps Automation
90. Exploring Advanced Logging and Tracing with Alibaba Cloud
91. Architecting for Cost-Effective DevOps with Alibaba Cloud
92. Real-World Case Study: A Large-Scale DevOps Implementation on Alibaba Cloud
93. Building and Managing Multi-Tenant Applications on Alibaba Cloud
94. Service Mesh Implementation with Alibaba Cloud’s ServiceMesh
95. Advanced Cloud-Native Architectures with Alibaba Cloud
96. Implementing Chaos Engineering on Alibaba Cloud for Continuous Reliability
97. Managing Cross-Region DevOps Workflows with Alibaba Cloud
98. Optimizing Cloud Performance with Alibaba Cloud's CloudOptimizer
99. Building End-to-End Secure DevOps Pipelines on Alibaba Cloud
100. The Future of DevOps with Alibaba Cloud: Trends and Innovations