Alibaba Cloud Provider

The Alibaba Cloud Provider allows you to manage resources within the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem, including compute, storage, networking, and database services. It is essential for automating infrastructure in one of Asia’s leading cloud platforms.

Key Features:

  • Provision Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, scaling groups, and load balancers.
  • Manage Object Storage Service (OSS) buckets and tables.
  • Configure VPCs, subnets, and security groups for networking.
  • Automate database services like RDS and NoSQL solutions.

Example Use Case: Creating an ECS Instance
Here’s how to create an ECS instance with Alibaba Cloud:

provider "alicloud" {
  region = "cn-shanghai"
}

resource "alicloud_instance" "example" {
  instance_name = "example-instance"
  instance_type = "ecs.t5-lc2m1.nano"
  image_id      = "ubuntu_18_04_64_20G_alibase_20201021.vhd"
  security_groups = [alicloud_security_group.example.id]
}

resource "alicloud_security_group" "example" {
  name = "example-security-group"
}

What’s Happening Here?

  • The provider block connects Terraform to the cn-shanghai region in Alibaba Cloud.
  • The alicloud_instance resource creates an ECS instance with specified machine type and image.
  • A security group is also created and attached to the instance.
Glossary