ECS on Chen Kai Blog

Alibaba Cloud Full Stack (2): ECS — Compute That Actually Makes Sense

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The first ECS instance I ever launched was wildly over-provisioned. I picked the biggest instance I could find — an ecs.r6.8xlarge with 32 vCPUs and 256 GiB RAM — to run a Flask app that served maybe 20 requests per minute. I burned through credits in a week, panicked, learned how to downsize online, and discovered my app ran perfectly on a 2-vCPU box costing 94% less. Right-sizing matters more than raw power, and understanding the compute layer is the single most useful thing you can learn about any cloud platform.

Alibaba Cloud Full Stack (1): The Ecosystem Map — What Alibaba Cloud Actually Is

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I spent my first week on Alibaba Cloud completely lost in a sea of product names. ECS, SLB, SLS, RDS, OSS, NAS, PAI, ARMS, ACK, FC, CDN, WAF, RAM, KMS, ROS, CloudMonitor, EventBridge, PolarDB, Lindorm, AnalyticDB, MaxCompute, DataWorks, Flink, DashScope, Bailian, OpenSearch… Every console page links to three more products I haven’t heard of. The documentation assumes you already know what everything is. The English translations are sometimes literal, sometimes creative, and occasionally missing. This is the guide I wish someone had handed me before I burned my first weekend clicking through consoles and reading translated docs that explained feature flags without ever explaining what the product does.

OpenClaw QuickStart (10): Production Deploy and the Failure Modes Nobody Warns You About

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The local install gets you to ‘it works on my machine.’ The server install ensures it survives a kernel update.

This chapter walks through the deployment I use on a 2-core 4GB ECS box and the common failures I’ve documented.

Choosing your server#

Terraform for AI Agents (4): Compute — ECS, ACK, or Function Compute?

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The single most important architectural decision in an agent system is where the agent loop process runs. There are three good options on Aliyun, plus a fourth that almost everyone forgets. Picking the wrong one isn’t catastrophic — you can migrate later — but it costs weeks of unnecessary work and several thousand RMB a month in idle compute.

This article covers all four options with working Terraform, cost crossovers, and operational gotchas I often encounter.