So, I'm here on the Alibaba Cloud homepage. Let's navigate over to the console and set ourselves up a new RDS instance. So I'll click on Console here in the upper right, that will take me over to the Console homepage. From the homepage I can navigate over to RDS. I'll do that by mousing over this orange and white button here in the upper left, and then mousing over products and services. From here I can enter keywords to perform a keyword search, I'll type in RDS. And then here's ApsaraDB for RDS, which is Alibaba Cloud's database service.

So we'll navigate over to the database console, and I need to choose a region. I will choose Singapore, and then we'll create a new database here in the Singapore region. To do that I go up to the upper right-hand corner, then I click on create instance. I can choose one of two billing methods here, subscription, or pay as you go. Typically, if you choose subscription, prices will be lower than pay-as-you-go. So if you were to compare the overall price for running a pay-as-you-go instance for a week or a month, versus a subscription instance, then subscriptions are cheaper. But since I'm doing a demo and I want to be able to delete this instance afterwards, I'm still going to pick, pay-as-you-go.

Well, you can see here, you can choose from any of these four database engines. MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or MariaDB. And for each of them, we offer multiple different versions. I'm going to choose MySQL 5.7. And I can choose either basic, high availability, or enterprise. And again, that's in either a one, two, or three node deployment. In my case, I will stick to basic. You'll notice that for the high availability and enterprise classes, I sometimes have more storage options here. So for instance, ESSD PL3 is a very, very fast solid state enhanced storage. But for basic, we only have standard SSD in Singapore, so that's what I'll choose. I can choose any of the three zones in Singapore in which to deploy my instance. I'll go with zone A, and then I have to choose a CPU core and memory configuration.

So you can see, I could do anything from a micro.1, which is one CPU core and one gigabyte of RAM, up to a xlarge.1, which is eight CPU cores on 32 gigabytes of RAM, I'll go with a micro.1. And then again, compute and storage are decoupled for the basic instance. So I can choose storage for my micro.1 instance just by sliding this slider bar here, I can have up to six terabytes for a basic instance right now. I'm going to actually just stick with 20 gigabytes, that is enough. I'll then click next to go to instance configuration, I have to choose a VPC group and a VSwitch to attach to. I'll do that here at the top. Then I need to choose a parameter template for my SQL InnoDB database engine. I'll stick with this high-performance defaults template.

I have to choose a time zone, I'm in China so I'll stick with UTC +8, and I can choose whether Table names are case sensitive or not, the default is case insensitive. So we will leave that default setting. And then if I want, I can move my instance to a resource group so that it can be managed and accessed as part of a set of resources that might include some load balancers, and ECS, but not, I will leave that at the default setting. And down here at the very bottom I can check all of the configuration settings that I have chosen on the last few pages. Again were MySQL version 5.7, Singapore zone A, basic instance type, attached to our Singapore VPC, a with one CPU core and one gigabyte of RAM, which supports a maximum of 2000 concurrent database connections, that should be plenty for this demo.

So I'll click next and go to confirm order. From here, I just need to double check my settings once again, agree to the terms of service, say how many ECS instances I would like to purchase, I just want one, and I'll choose pay now. And that should purchase my RDS instance and start the setup process. So it may take a few minutes for the instance to start. We can now close this tab, refresh the database list here. And in a few moments, we should see our new instance is in the creating state. So let's wait for that to finish.

After a few minutes, the RDS database is up and running and ready to use. All I need to do to manage the database is either click on manage here, or click on the instance ID, which will take me to the database's homepage, where I can see it's region and zone, configure a white list for its internal endpoint, apply for a public intranet endpoint if I would like one, a CV database's port number, make changes to the billing settings for the instance, release it if I'd like, change its specifications so that I can upgrade or downgrade it, and create accounts and databases.