Before we create a VPC let’s see what is a VPC in Alibaba Cloud and it benefits.

Virtual Private Cloud is a private isolated network within the Alibaba cloud. You get a full control over the IP Addressing and provisioning the subnets for your private cloud instances. It also gives the flexibility of connecting the VPC to another VPC or connect the VPC to an on-premise network as well.

Secondly, ECS (Elastic Compute Service) is called as the compute segment of the Alibaba cloud.

So we will look that the steps as to how to create these two.

1. Expecting that you have logged in to your Alibaba Cloud Console.
2. Then click on the left side top corner click on the “Products” and select the “Virtual Private Cloud” under the Networking option.

3. Next, you have the option to change to your preferred Alibaba Region. We have selected UAE, Dubai as our preferred region.

4. To create a new VPC, click on the “Virtual Private Cloud” and then click on the button “Create VPC”

5. Next, we need to give a name to the VPC and select the preferred subnet for the VPC. This can be custom configured and even a public subnet can be configured by contacting the Alibaba support. After that name the VSwitch and configure the subnet details for the VSwitch also don’t forget to select the preferred zone.

6. That’s it. Once you are done click on the “OK” button to save the configuration.

Now let’s see how to create an ECS instance under the same VPC.

1. Click on Products>Elastic Compute Service>Instances>Create Instance

2. On the next window, select the required instance type. Then click Next.

3. On the next window, I have chosen the number instance to 1. Then OS image has been selected as CentOS. Finally reduced the System Disk size to 20 GB. (System disk size is your choice so you may change it according to your requirement.)

4. Now on the Networking window, select the VPC and the VSwitch from the drop-down box. Then select the Ports 80 and 443 to open. Then proceed Next to System Configuration.

5. On the next screen select your preferred method to set the login credential and set the “Instance name” and “Hostname”

6. Next, you can set the preferred tags for the instance. Here we have added the type of OS tag and the Role tagging.

7. Finally, accept the service terms and proceed to create the order. In a couple of minutes, the instance will be ready to use.

8. Once it is deployed you can view the instances from the “instances” section and then manage/connect to the instance.

That’s all about creating and working with VPC and ECS instances.