What Is an “Application” in Alibaba Cloud Function Compute and Why It Matters?

Application abstraction in Alibaba Cloud Function Compute

Alibaba Cloud Function Compute now defines a three‑layer model: Function → Service → Application . An Application is a logical collection of one or more Function‑as‑a‑Service (FaaS) resources and one or more Backend‑as‑a‑Service (BaaS) resources that together deliver a complete business capability.

Key concepts

Function : the smallest executable unit, e.g., a REST API endpoint, an image‑processing trigger, or a scheduled cleanup task.

Service : a group of functions that share common configuration such as VPC, NAS, log store, or other resources. The service acts as a configuration envelope for its functions.

Application : a higher‑level logical unit that binds multiple services (and their functions) with BaaS resources such as domains, OSS buckets, NAS, MySQL, Redis, VPC, and logging. An application typically corresponds to a single code repository.

Benefits of the Application layer

Each application can be mapped to a Git repository; pushing code to GitHub (or any Git service) can automatically trigger build and deployment of all associated resources.

Lifecycle operations—monitoring, alerting, multi‑environment management, and full deletion—are performed at the application level, simplifying operations.

Applications are importable from Serverless Devs‑compatible packages or created from built‑in templates (AI demos, web frameworks, etc.), enabling rapid onboarding.

Typical workflow for a community‑contributed template

Submit the template to the official Application submission form. Example discussion for submission: https://github.com/Serverless-Devs/Serverless-Devs/discussions/439

After review and approval, the template appears in the Application Center.

In the console, click Create , then Deploy , and finally Experience to run the application.

Concrete example: PNG lossless‑compression application

The example demonstrates a serverless application that provides three functions:

Function 1 : REST API for managing photo albums (CRUD operations).

Function 2 : Triggered by OSS object upload; performs asynchronous image compression, image caption generation, and person clustering.

Function 3 : Scheduled task that cleans up or analyses resources periodically.

All functions share common BaaS resources: an OSS bucket for storage, a NAS mount for temporary files, a MySQL database for metadata, a Redis cache, a dedicated VPC, and a log store. These resources, together with the functions, constitute the Application .

To publish the application:

Develop the functions locally and push the source code to a Git repository.

Fill out the official submission form (refer to the GitHub discussion link above). The form captures the repository URL, resource definitions (in template.yml), and a short description.

Upon approval, the application is synchronized to the Application Center, where other users can create an instance with a few clicks.

End‑user deployment steps:

Create : The console creates a new service, allocates the required BaaS resources, and links them to the functions.

Deploy : The platform builds the function packages, uploads them to the Function Compute runtime, and configures triggers (HTTP, OSS, or timer).

Experience : Users can invoke the REST API or upload images to the OSS bucket to see the compression workflow in action.

Observability and management

Each deployment generates logs and metrics that are viewable in the Application console. Deployments can be rolled back to a previous version, and the entire application can be deleted with a single operation, automatically cleaning up all associated resources.

Open ecosystem

The Application Center supports two creation methods:

Import a package that follows the Serverless Devs specification.

Instantiate from built‑in templates (AI object detection, OCR, web frameworks, etc.).

All templates are community‑contributed and hosted in the Serverless Devs application repository, making the ecosystem open and extensible.

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