While it may not have the same global presence as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud remains one of the top cloud computing providers in the world and is dominant in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, especially China.
Also known as Aliyun, Alibaba Cloud offers a large suite of services and has a decent global network, but that’s not all. Read on as we delve into the details of the platform’s services, benefits, challenges and competitors.
What Is Alibaba Cloud?
Alibaba Cloud is a cloud service provider owned by Alibaba Group, which started out as an e-commerce platform. While Alibaba Group was established in 1999, Alibaba Cloud launched in 2009, about a decade after its parent company.
Alibaba Cloud is primarily a public cloud provider, but it also supports private cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments. It has a growing AI ecosystem, and the Qwen series of LLMs is one of its top successes in the field.
Where Is Alibaba Located?
Alibaba Cloud has its headquarters in Hangzhou, China. That said, it has 87 availability zones across 29 cloud regions in 14 countries worldwide.
What Is Alibaba Cloud Used For?
Alibaba Cloud has various purposes, including cloud security, cloud networking, edge computing, container orchestration, AI and machine learning, the Internet of Things and analytics.
Consistent with its diverse use cases, Alibaba Cloud’s applications span various industries, such as finance, software development, media, manufacturing, retail, telecommunication, healthcare and sports.
What Types of Services Does Alibaba Cloud Offer?
Alibaba Cloud provides services across many different cloud delivery models, including IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, CaaS and FaaS.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Alibaba Cloud offers various IaaS tools, including virtual servers, virtual storage, bare metal servers and virtual networking.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): Alibaba Cloud has multiple PaaS offerings — from Compute Nest to Serverless App Engine and DBStack — with an increased focus on software development.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): Alibaba Cloud’s SaaS products include Alibaba Mail, Direct Mail, YiDA, Short Message Service and DingTalk.
- Container as a Service (CaaS): In Alibaba Cloud’s CaaS catalog, you’ll find services like Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), Serverless Kubernetes Services (ASK) and Container Compute Service (ACS).
- Function as a Service (FaaS): The main FaaS solution on Alibaba Cloud is Function Compute,which you can use for workloads like event-driven processing, real-time processing, task scheduling and serverless application programming interfaces (APIs).
Examples of Alibaba Cloud Products
Alibaba Cloud offers products and services in several categories, including compute, storage, containers, networking and content delivery networks (CDNs), middleware, security, databases and analytics computing. Let’s talk about some of the most popular services on Alibaba Cloud.
Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
ECS offers two launch options for creating virtual machine instances.
Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is Alibaba Cloud’s foremost virtual machine service. It is also the solution on which many of its other services are built, including Serverless App Engine and Compute Nest.
ECS Bare Metal Instance
Like with other dedicated server offerings, you’ll have to contact sales
to get ECS Bare Metal Instance.
As with many virtual machine services, ECS features shared tenancy, with virtual private clouds providing logical isolation. That said, when enhanced security and performance are a priority, users can opt for the ECS Bare Metal Instance, which offers dedicated tenancy.
Object Storage Service (OSS)
OSS has four storage tiers: Standard, Infrequent Access, Archive and Cold Archive.
Object Storage Service (OSS) is used to store unstructured data, data archives, content distribution, static web hosting and data lakes. It boasts a durability of 99.9999999999% — that’s one more “9” than Amazon S3 offers, and it provides similar availability.
Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
When setting up EBS, you may choose to attach it to an ECS instance.
You can use Elastic Block Storage (EBS) to store data in equally sized blocks. It is best used for high-performance, low-latency workloads since its input/output operations are optimized for rapid access.
Function Compute
Function Compute serves various purposes, including media processing and AI reasoning.
Function Compute is similar to AWS Lambda — both are serverless solutions that execute functional units of code, typically in response to a trigger or an event. The runtimes that are currently supported include Node.js, Python, PHP, Java, C# and Go.
Serverless App Engine (SAE)
At present, Alibaba Cloud doesn’t offer free trials for Serverless App Engine.
Serverless App Engine (SAE) is a fully managed PaaS tool. Developers can focus on application development and deployment while Alibaba Cloud handles infrastructure provisioning and management.
SAE integrates well with CI/CD tools like Yunxiao, Alibaba Container Registry and Jenkins. It also has an underlying microservices framework that supports both monolithic and microservices architectures.
Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK)
To use ACK on Alibaba Cloud, you need to authorize RAM roles first.
On Alibaba Cloud, Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) is the equivalent of Google Kubernetes Engine and Azure Kubernetes Service. All three tools are managed Kubernetes services, which allow you to focus on container operations while the service provider handles the underlying infrastructure.
Alibaba Cloud Benefits
Besides its scalability and extensive catalog of services, Alibaba Cloud is also known for its competitive pricing and focus on emerging technologies.
- Competitive pricing: Alibaba Cloud has competitive rates for similar services that other top cloud providers offer, especially in the APAC region. That aside, you also get flexible pricing plans and cost optimization tools.
- Scalability: Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure has a large network of data centers in multiple countries around the world. It also has diverse classes of compute resources and auto-scaling tools, allowing it to scale up or down to support varied workload demands.
- Comprehensive suite of services: When using Alibaba Cloud, you can access a broad set of services across different delivery models, including IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and CaaS.
- Focus on emerging technologies: Alibaba Cloud is well invested in emerging technologies for AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, edge computing and big data processing.
Alibaba Cloud Challenges
While its high scalability and large portfolio make it one of the hyperscaler clouds, you may experience a language barrier, more complex compliance and increased latency when using Alibaba Cloud.
- Focus on China: While Alibaba Cloud has data centers spread across various countries and continents, its resources are mostly domiciled in the APAC region, especially China.
- Latency: Since a large portion of its resources are in China, Alibaba Cloud users outside the APAC region sometimes complain of high latency (slower data transfers).
- Language barrier: Users may face language barriers when trying to resolve complex issues with customer support.
- Compliance: For some foreign organizations, achieving compliance (like with GDPR) while using Alibaba Cloud is complex, mostly due to geopolitical factors. For example, the technological rivalry between the West and China leaves Western organizations in a tight spot regarding their ties to Chinese companies.
- Privacy concerns: Certain data transfers outside China require Chinese government approval, raising privacy concerns about the government’s access to data stored with companies like Alibaba Cloud.
Concerns Around Privacy, Security and Compliance
There are concerns regarding the Chinese government’s access to data stored on Alibaba Cloud as provided by laws such as Data Security Law.
However, these concerns are primarily speculative and due to tensions between Western nations and China, as there are no specific instances of known privacy breaches arising from such laws. That said, the concerns are valid since many Chinese companies benefit from government subsidies and may readily comply to get even more benefits.
Government access to data with tech companies isn’t unique to China as other nations also have laws that allow them to demand such access. For instance, the U.S. has the CLOUD Act, and Germany’s tax law, criminal law, and national security law make room to demand access to data.
To enhance data protection, the EU enforced stricter compliance standards (particularly those concerning data sovereignty) through regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
While not explicitly requiring data storage within their physical domain, GDPR deters the transfer of sensitive data to territories deemed to have insufficient data protection frameworks.
With China’s data protection structure still somewhat considered questionable, these standards make it harder for EU companies to achieve compliance when using providers like Alibaba Cloud.
Top Alibaba Cloud Competitors
On the global scene, Alibaba Cloud’s competitors include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Salesforce and Oracle Cloud. Of these providers, Azure, Google Cloud and AWS are the only services that have had consistently higher market shares than Alibaba Cloud.
In China, Tencent Cloud, Huawei Cloud and Baidu AI Cloud are Alibaba Cloud’s local competitors.
What Does the Future Look Like for Alibaba?
Alibaba Cloud is poised to build on its growing AI investment and increase its involvement in open-source AI. Beyond that, it plans to expand its global infrastructure through partnerships with companies like Business Connexion (BCX).
Despite the steep competition, Alibaba Cloud’s efforts toward growth and global expansion are intense, increasing its likelihood of success.
Final Thoughts
Alibaba Cloud is a good choice if you’re within China or the APAC region. It helps that the service is highly scalable and offers a vast range of services with competitive pricing. Even outside China and the APAC region, you’ll get a lot of good use out of Alibaba Cloud, especially when it comes to the AI scene.
Have you ever used Alibaba Cloud? If so, which of its services did you use and how was your experience with it? How did its pricing compare to other hyperscaler clouds that offer the same services? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.
FAQ: Alibaba Cloud Computing Services
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Yes, Alibaba is a Chinese company. However, it has a global reach.
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Companies like Duolingo, Ford, Sephora, Schneider, AstraZeneca, Casio and HP China are using Alibaba Cloud.
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The differences between Alibaba Cloud and AWS include global infrastructure, pricing and performance. AWS has a larger global coverage, which encourages consistent performance in most parts of the world. However, Alibaba Cloud typically has lower prices and more Chinese data centers, making its performance in China more consistent compared to AWS.
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The disadvantages of Alibaba Cloud include language barriers, complex compliance and increased latency.
Sources:
- Alibaba Launches a $52.4 Billion Initiative to Lead in Cloud and AI – Yahoo Finance
