When it comes to selecting a cloud computing platform for an organisation, the wise choice must be made. The leading cloud service providers are AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The irony of these companies is that all of them are American multinational organisations. Another popular cloud computing platform is Alibaba Cloud.
Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, is a cloud computing platform developed by the Chinese multinational company Alibaba Group. Launched in 2009, it offers different types of cloud services ranging from basic infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), elastic computing, storage and database solutions, to advanced capabilities like machine learning.
Birth
Before Alibaba Cloud, AWS and Azure were the cloud service providers in China. AWS had two availability zones in China. One in Beijing run by Chinese company Sinnet, and one in Ningxia, which is run by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology (NWCD). According to Chinese law, it doesn’t allow foreign companies to run their infrastructure services here.
So, typically it was foreign cloud platforms managed by Chinese companies. Alibaba cloud was created with the aim to provide cloud-based services for Chinese availability zones. Alibaba currently has 7 availability zones in China itself. Because of this reason, Alibaba is the largest cloud computing company in China.
Emergence
Alibaba started it services initially for small businesses in China and gradually expanded their services to other countries by launching data centres in different countries. On August 2015, it’s first data centre was opened in Singapore, making Singapore as Alibaba’s International Cloud’s overseas headquarters. Currently, Alibaba has 50 availability zones in Dubai, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, India, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.
As per the Synergy Report Group, Alibaba cloud becomes the world’s fourth-biggest provider of cloud infrastructure and related services. The top three are Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Alibaba became the official cloud service provider for the Olympics in January 2017. For the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, an integrated and innovative cloud technology platform is being built by Alibaba.
Conclusion
Alibaba cloud is the most successful business of Alibaba group. It became successful enough to compete with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google. Although the revenue of Alibaba is less than the major cloud providers, Alibaba cloud continues to expand and innovate their services to meet the growing demands in cloud technology.
About Us
Urolime is one of the leading DevOps consulting company with a handful of experience in supporting customers around the globe in adopting DevOps practices. As an AWS and Cloud consulting partner, Urolime not only has experience in Cloud Migrations but also support the vast customer base to enable scalable and highly available architecture on AWS, Azure, and GCP. The customers benefit from our expert involvement in Deployment Automation (CI/CD), Infrastructure Automation, Dockerization, Security, Disaster Recovery Planning & Implementation and 24/7 Managed Services with 10 Minutes SLA. Urolime is one of the companies which deals with a bunch of Kubernetes solution build for the customer on AWS, Azure, and GCP.
