Deploying Your First ECS

What is BytePlus Elastic Compute Service (ECS)?

Check out BytePlus ECS Documentation

BytePlus Elastic Compute Service or ECS is a virtual machine or instance that you can deploy on BytePlus environment. You can choose the specs for the instance, from their CPU, memory, and volumes. This resources is mapped logically to a physical hardware server in data center. if you have experience on Amazon Web Services (AWS) it’s the same as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

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Deploying Your First Instance

Below are the steps for deploying your very first instance inside BytePlus, I will go from accessing the BytePlus site, accessing their console, to starting and accessing the instance that are deployed.

1. Accessing BytePlus Site

You can access the BytePlus Site Here

Before we can start choosing and deploying our instances, we obviously need to access BytePlus first.

BytePlus Site

2. Accesing BytePlus Console

You can access the BytePlus Console Here

After accesing BytePlus, you can either click on the top right “Console” button, or access it through the subdomain.

BytePlus Console

3. Find the Service

On your first time accessing the console, you’ll need to search or find the service from all of the provided services in the console. Use the search bar and search for “ECS or elastic” or type the full service name, if you’ve ever visited any services in the console, the service will be listed under a section called “Recently Visited Services”

BytePlus Console

4. ECS Dashboard

When the dashboard come up, you’ll be shown the overview dashboard, you can either create your first instance from the button on overview dashboard, or you can create it from the instace sidebar.

BytePlus ECS Overview Dashboard

BytePlus ECS Instance Sidebar

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Instance Configuration

Click on the tiny ? button for more detailed information

I will make the instance configuration as separate steps, since BytePlus has done a really nice job of explaining what certain configuration does, what they are, how they will impact the cost, etc.

instance creation overview

1. Basic Configuration

In the basic configuration section, there are two part that you can configure, which are Billing Method and Region and AZ.

Billing Method

Billing Method

In the billing method part, there are 3 total options you can choose before creating your instance:

1. Pay-as-you-go: Billed on the hour, and the instance is yours until you stop or delete it.
2. Subscription: Billed settled by subsription term, like montly or annual.
3. Spot Instance: Like pay as you go with bigger discount, but your instance can be released by BytePlus since you’re using the spare capacity with warning of course

if you want a more detailed explanation, BytePlus already made the comparison table when you click the ? button which explain it better than me.

Instance Billing Method Comparison | source: BytePlus

Region and AZ

Region here is basically a geographical region where the data center is located. AZ which is short for Availability Zone refers to a physical data center. Again, if you want more detailed explanation on this check out the ? button.

For basic configuration steps, i’ll be choosing pay as you go billing method, and Asia Pasific (Jakarta) region,and Asia Pasific (Jakarta) A for the AZ

Instance Basic Configuration

2. Instance

After configuring the billing and region, we can move on to choosing your instance type, this basically choosing the specifications for your instance that best fits your services or workload that you want to run on that instance.

There are several ways that you can filter through all the available instance types, from filtering them with the total amount of vCPUs, memory, and the usage of the instance, which come with this options:

1. All
2. General Purpose
3. Compute Optimized
4. Local-SSD
5. Bare Metal
6. Shared

Below are the recommended instance type families for your business scenarios based on BytePlus recommendation Here

Business Scenarion	Commonly Used Software	Recommended Instance Type Families
Web Service	Apache, Nginx	General Purpose, Compute Optimized, General Purpose EBM, Compute Optimized EBM
Middleware	RocketMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka	General Purpose, General Purpose EBM
Database	MySQL,NoSQL	Memory Optimized, Local SSD
Cache	Redis, Memcache	Memory Optimized
Big Data	HDFS, MapReduce	Local SSD, Big Data

For now i’ll be choosing the General Purpose option, and choosing the ecs.g4i for the family, and ecs.g4i.large as the instance type.

Instance Type Picker

3. Mirror Image

Now we continue with choosing Operating Systems (OS), BytePlus called this Mirror Image, basically a place where you can pick and choose images for your instances. BytePlus gives 3 options for this:

1. Public Images: Images that you pick from here, are provided by BytePlus.
2. Custom Images: Images comes from our own uploaded or created private images.
3. Shared Images: Images that are shared by other BytePlus account.

and after picking your image, there will be a dropdown section where you can choose your image version. For now, I’ll be choosing Debian for the OS and for the version I’ll be running the Debian 12 version.

Mirror Image

4. Storage

Check the storage documentation Here

ok so after choosing the image, now we pick the storage configuration, oh yea also known as Elastic Block Storage (EBS), BytePlus gives several Storage Types and Performance level for the configurationc, and of course system volume and data volume. below are a quick introduction to it:

Volume Type

1. System Volume: This type is used for storing your operating systems.
2. Data Volume: This type is used to store the application data. (Note: you can mount a data volume pre or post ECS creation)

Storage Type

1. ESSD FlexPL: ideal for intensive workload that require low latency
2. ESSD PL0: ideal for moderate workload like small to medium size workload
3. TSSD TL0: ideal for workload that need high bandwidth ant not sensitive to latency

More detailed explanation on storage type, their use cases, and their benefit Here

for this guide, I’ll be choosing for the system volume an ESSD storage type and the performance level PL0.

Storage Configuration

5. Network and Security Group

Now we can move on to Network and security group configuration. there are a couple of things you can configure here:

1. VPC: Virtual Private Cloud is an isolated virtual network environment for the resources on the cloud.
2. Subnet: Subnet in cloud platform is a subdivison of an IP address range within a VPC
3. Security Group: is an collection of security rules where you can use to filter traffic going in or out of the services.

Since this is a simple deploy your first ECS guide, we’ll be using just default VPC, Subnet, and Security Group for this guide.

Network and Security Group

6. Public Network Access

Next is the configuration so that your instance have internet connection, the configuration that you need to choose is enabling the “Assign Elastic IP (EIP)”. and the rest is self explanatory.

Public Network Access

7. Login Method

For Login Method, there will be 2 options that we can use for the Login Credentials:

1. Password: with password, you can connect/access the ECS from the console using the inputted password
2. Key Pair: with Key pair, you’ll be prompted to download the private key and store it somewhere, this will be used for connecting with SSH.

for this guide, we will use Key Pair, when choosing this options, we can either create it from this instance configuration, or create key pair before doing the instance configuration.

Creating Key Pair

Login Method

8. Instance Configuration

Lastly, it’s Instance Configuration, in this section we can put in our instance name, hostname, and changing the project.

Instance Configuration

9. Deploying the Instance

After the last instance configuration, on the right side of the dashboard there will be Configuration Details where you can see all the configuration that we’ve done and the price for it. To deploy just click Buy Now.

Configuration Details Overview

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Post Instance Creation

With the configuration process done, you’ll be given a new page saying that the instance is submitted, and you can check it on the console.

Instance Submitted Page

Instance Deployed

Connecting to Instance

So now after the instance is up and running, we can try accesing the instance, we gonna use ssh for this

Instance SSH Connect

Finish

Ok now you’ve deployed instance on BytePlus environment, congratulations!