Alibaba Cloud
alibabacloud.com
alibabacloud.com
> As an international website building platform, obtaining an ICP license for China is very important to our users. The actual process of obtaining an ICP license though is quite complex. With Alibaba Cloud’s built-in and easy-to-follow ICP application process, it has helped with our user experience a lot.
Seems like it's killer feature is China ICP license made easy.
Don't forget, however, that the ICP license might just be the START of the Chinese business license gauntlet! If you do business other than basically just serving content, assume there's other licenses that need acquiring. Always get local help with this.
Aliyun - send paper A, B, C to us and a payment, the license comes to office in 2 weeks
Chinese Azure - send money to us
A day after, send paper A there, paper B there, C there
A week after - ChiComs come to the office questioning you why you omitted that thing in this paper, and give you nice time
A few weeks later you get your papers. I do not see what they call a service there.
China on the other hand still has plenty of workers to fill its mills.
Actually during the Ford era, we went on an anti-immigration phase.
Why should we "assume"? By Ford era, I'm assuming you meant his introduction of assembly line and mass production right? That started in 1913.
> we could say this was towards the end of the Ford era.
Can we? You say ford era. What time period are you referring to? Because from 1900 to 1924, the US was highly anti-immigrant.
> I guess we had overdone on immigration and started regretting it.
I guess? We've always been anti-immigrant as a nation. There really wasn't a time when immigrants were welcome in the US.
Because that is false. It works for developed markets with existing strong industries. Dieter Frisch - former Director General for Development at the European Commission says in his La politique de développement de l'Union européenne [1], on page 38 of the PDF:
"En effet, on ne connaît historiquement aucun cas où un pays au stade précoce de son évolution économique se serait développé via son ouverture à la concurrence internationale. Le développement s’est toujours amorcé au gré d’une certaine protection qu’on a pu diminuer au fur et à mesure que l’économie s’était suffisamment fortifiée pour affronter la concurrence extérieure. Mais un tel processus s’étend sur de longues années, sans parler du préalable que constituent, dans le cas des ACP, la mise en place et le fonctionnement de structures régionales."
Essentially, it means that there are no cases of a country that developed through opening its economy to international competition. It always required protectionism which reduces gradually overtime as it is able to grow and absorb and compete with external competition. Haven't you noticed third world countries that attempt to follow America's advice never escape the poverty trap? What works for America does not imply it'll work for other countries.
[1] http://ecdpm.org/wp-content/uploads/PMR-15-Politique-Develop...
I though it was so the people of the country have better lives.
Essentially: if you turn your country into {other country, except with cheaper labor}, then you kill the uniqueness of your national identity. Which is one of the biggest assets you ultimately have in international trade, if all countries were economically alike.
When the IMF and others advice against it, it's because they are not thinking in the welfare of the country in question in the first place.
The other side of the coin is that it's very difficult (or inefficient) to develop a country without access to knowledge and technology from outside, so you need foreign currency.
In order to get foreign currency, you need to sell something or investment from outside that bring what is necessary, but you need a way for the benefits to stay in the country. Navigating this dichotomy is something that the Chinese are doing very well.
They've been dangling the "access" carrot on a stick in front of myopic shareholders and corporate management for 30 years, without ever delivering.
It's great if they want to grow their internal economy. But call a duck a duck: it's done at the expense of freedom for anyone who chooses to engage.
Sure they are.
I'm not an expert but my perception is that China is using two carrots: cheap labour and big markets.
If you are foreign capital, in order to profit you need to create a "mix enterprise" with local capital. The result is that they get the know-how and knowledge and they diminish the chance of relocation to cheaper places.
When they sell their products abroad, they also get foreign currency that allow them to import technology and expertise.
That is very well done.
If you think this is morally wrong (even if every developed country did it), considered the following:
"according to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China)
500 million people. That justify a little trickery I think.
Compare that to the morality of people in IMF and other institutions that advice poor countries (in collusion with corrupt local authorities) to open totally their markets.
That said, they, like Britain and the US before them, deserve to be called on the discrepancy between what they say and what they do.
I don't like the protecting laws of my country, avoiding cheaper and better products coming here. I would like to understand more about this, I hope I am wrong disliking this.
Consider Thailand and Malaysia, two neighbouring countries in SE Asia. In Thailand, they opened up markets to car manufacturers and suppliers, with the result that Thailand is now one of Asia's largest car manufacturing hubs. In Malaysia, they imposed protectionist barriers and tried to build their own cars. Ever heard of Proton or Perodua? No? There's a reason you haven't -- they're terrible.
Protective taxes. Domestic growth. Expertise. Drop taxes and start telling everyone else how great free trade is.
It's a pretty winning playbook.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_Thail...
When arguing something works you can't just ignore how often it doesn't. Development Economics is not so simple.
S. Korea is not a SE Asian country...
A better comparison: S. Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam all started with sub $200 GDP/capita in 1960. As of last year, S. Korea's has exploded to ~27k, while Thailand and others are below $6k.
No. It is in the NORTHEAST of asia.
"In common usage, the term Northeast Asia typically refers to a region including China.[2][3] In this sense, the core countries constituting Northeast Asia are China, Japan, North Korea, and South Korea."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Asia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Northeast_Asian_count...
If you don't even know simple things like geography and locations of major nations, why are you even talking about economics?
> Nation groupings aren't exactly scientific taxonomies.
We aren't talking nation groupings. We are talking GEOGRAPHY. NORTH/SOUTH/EAST/WEST.
It isn't bullshit. It is truth.
> In Thailand, they opened up markets to car manufacturers and suppliers, with the result that Thailand is now one of Asia's largest car manufacturing hubs.
But thai car companies aren't building the cars. They are just building cars for foreigners.
> In Malaysia, they imposed protectionist barriers and tried to build their own cars. Ever heard of Proton or Perodua? No? There's a reason you haven't -- they're terrible.
Can you name a thai car company?
"According to Paul Bairoch, since the end of the 18th century, the United States has been "the homeland and bastion of modern protectionism". In fact, the United States never adhered to free trade until 1945. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
The US was protectionist. Korea, Japan are protectionist. Russia is protectionist. And even much of europe is/was protectionist.
You need protectionism to develop your own companies/industries. Otherwise, you become just a supplier for a company.
The difference between thailand and malaysia is that malaysia want their own "Ford/Toyota/etc". Thailand just wants to be a low-end supplier on the bottom of the supply chain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_...
We shouldn't be surprised that most emerging economies have gone from high protectionism to low because they started from a position with high protectionism, and lowered it under advice and pressure from the first world--with very good results. Meanwhile, many countries in South America and Africa are doing things the protectionist way, with very poor results.
FWIW, I actually less trust a translated version from main stream media outlets, which 1) unlikely to report this type of narrative; 2) highly likely to cut out of context and interpret creatively.
> In effect, one cannot historically find a single case where a country at an early stage of its economic development would have developed through its opening to international competition. Development has always been attracted [lit. "baited to consent"] with a certain degree of protection that has been diminished as the economy has strengthened sufficiently to face external competition. But such a process extends over many years, not to mention the prerequisite which consists, in the case of the ACP [I believe this is the "États d'Afrique, Caraïbes et Pacifique", parties to the Cotonou Agreement], of the putting in place and operation of regional structures.
Otoh, if you look at an state visit, every head of state brings along a trade delegation whose goal is to ease trade.
It's such a complicated issue that you could argue almost anything. I think any discussion must acknowledge Hong Kong, however, as an important data point.
My opinion is that the Communist party, even despite its "GDP obsession" [1], has gotten in the way more than anything.
As an (admittedly, very rough) estimate, if you take Hong Kong's GDP per person and multiply it by China's population, you get $58 trillion.
[1] https://www.economist.com/news/china/21689628-chinas-obsessi...
Compared to what? to a contra-factual or to a real country?
Because 500 million people out of extreme poverty sounds pretty successfully to me. Specially if we compare it to any other country following more "open" strategies.
Just one counterargument I can see - China floundered economically under Mao, and only in the late 70s did real economic reform under Deng Xiaoping happen. An effective timeframe of <40 years, not 60-70. I'm sure other Asian countries experienced poor leadership at times, but to this degree? To stagnate as heavily as China did under Mao?
Lastly, size definitely matters, in terms of both geography and population. Even today a huge number of the population is dispersed across the rural regions. How can economic prosperity reach them? Much easier in other Asian countries for growth to accumulate in centralized economic centers and start improving the welfares of the population at large.
In this way China has indeed rode the wave of globalization because its bountiful cheap labor made it suited to manufacturing small goods for richer economies.
The capital accumulated through these activities were reinvested so that Chinese companies could move into more value added industries like electronics, automobiles, aerospace, and services, which is possible because China has a deep well of human capital (i.e. people) who have a strong work ethic and are eager to learn new skills.
Moreover, because China has both a gigantic internal market and vast human resources, it's possible that Chinese suppliers can have a competitive advantage in virtually every industry, making the benefits of external trade less obvious. (This was China's attitude towards Europeans during colonial times too - that trade was unnecessary because they had nothing of value to China).
Or if Chinese suppliers currently don't have a competitive advantage in terms of price or quality, the government can use protectionist policies to shield those industries until they do have an advantage.
You might say that China has played all the right cards in the game of globalization. Donald Trump had been saying it for a long time.
As opposed to the rest? :)
If the US or most other western countries had same number of people is China, they would be doing much better. Also to go out on a limb a bit, you could probably draw a graph which shows a correlation between China relaxing its protectionism and its GDP increasing at a faster rate as a result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
If you don't have a development plan, capital just create bubbles and then left the country in search of bigger profits. What is important is the creation of infrastructure and knowledge in the country that will work for its citizens. I don't know why this is a proposition so disputed. It seems that having a plan is always good except if we talk about economy.
Almost all the increment in the world reduction of poverty are due to China, but it's sold to us as a consequence of less protectionism.
Maybe, at the end of the day, what make China successful is that is too big to be bullied.
The country's problems, aka the price paid for the industrial success, are a bit less prominently seen. Western countries faced the same problems (pollution, bad work conditions, etc) at the time of their first industrial revolutions, but by now are totally unwilling to pay such a price any more.
Once it is competitive they will subsidize it (via. redistribution from financial repression of lower & middle class individuals to below market financing of businesses, and compliant regulation i.e. no unions, lax pollution) to give it an advantage to gain market share globally.
Regarding immigration, they already have a huge labor supply and if they need more I think they will prefer to do it by exporting their political and managerial apparatus, rather than importing bodies. For example their investments in Africa, and Australia: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/world/australia/china-pol... .
Has there ever been a huge advance in either software or hardware where the western world copied China? A brand new amazing programming language, a world changing battery technology, a cure for a big disease, etc?
I've seen a few interesting CS papers, but I don't keep up to much. As far as I can tell, all the biggest advancements are being done by companies here.
China is quite impressive in how they keep up in their own little bubble with their 1B people, but it's one thing to reimplement Google/Youtube, it's another thing to create new world changing technologies.
That's because we went through a neoliberal shift after ww2. Prior to ww2, we were leaders of protectionism.
"According to Paul Bairoch, since the end of the 18th century, the United States has been "the homeland and bastion of modern protectionism". In fact, the United States never adhered to free trade until 1945."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
We needed protectionism in order to protect our much younger companies/industries so that they can develop and grow and compete against more established british/european companies.
> yet china almost completely locks out foreign businesses and takes next to no immigrants and is obviously a quickly growing global superpower.
They need protectionism in order for their own companies or industries to develop. Otherwise, western corporations would just flood in and own the chinese market.
The problem is when chinese industries mature and their own markets get saturated, they are going to be in the same situation as the US/West. They are going to want to open up markets a round the world to sell their goods to and invest their excess capital.
We've had trouble with ours and essentially nobody has answers. The requirements can change without warning and no companies inside or outside of China have a surefire way to get, keep, and use an ICP license.
Yes the 15min made me angry too, as I needed to read about the Fastly fail on HN instead of the Imgix status page.
What would you use in your next project?
Imgix really annoyed me as they didnt bother replying about the status page fiasco, this is after we gave them a free-pass with their capacity planning which made us look like idiots recommending them (i.e images loading super slow). Not again, bad ethics.
For example I can thumbnail ~7M images in ~2 days on my dedicated machine (40/s) which costs me $60/mo to colocate. $60/mo gets me a paltry 20k images from Imgix (though admittedly I can process them multiple times for the same price, I don't need to).
For me Imgix is primarily a cheap CDN with the benefit of unlimited sizes of each image depending on the device.
Imgix is 8c/GB which is certainly competitive but by no means unique. CloudFront is only $0.005 more expensive on the higest tier and gets as low as $0.02 on the lowsest. A cheaper CDN like CDN77 starts at $0.049/GB and goes as low as $0.007/GB.
CDN77 performance in terms of latency is not that great. If you are looking for a cheap CDN with good performance, buy edgecast from a reseller. The only problem with edgecast is that they charge a really high fee for SSL support for custom domains
In both cases, the cost of doing it ourselves (using something like thumbor) would have been a few thousand per month. In the former example, imgix cost a few hundred, in the latter it would have cost in the hundreds of thousands.
imgix is the fastest of the services i've looked at (transformation time is roughly half what I got from cloudinary, and average response time is also about half), but its pricing model means it's completely unaffordable for certain types of product.
Saves upload time for large images at the very least
Disclosure: Transloadit founder
It should be a lot faster.
Thanks autocorrect!
Rights read. NO. Telephone call.NO. Why was I just arrested? WHO KNOWS? I need my lawyer. HA. You can't hold me for over 24 hours for nothing?
You don't like it? Sue us. The NYC tax payers will end paying all the costs. HA HA HA
My experience with "Due Process" in the USA. At least I got out alive, in China may have been different.
Thank you NYC taxpayers for that $1000 settlement check after legal fees. :-)
So, no, you can't trust anything hosted in mainland China. And, no, it's not the same as the US.
I have no solid opinion myself, as I have no real knowledge either way.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478772
Rational or irrational, we're definitely jealous, so whatever, that's high compliment for China. But China really is becoming a super, which means it's a threat to the old order. In South East Asia, it was once unthinkable to not see the US as an ally. Now this is shifting, for better or for worse cough South China Sea
What does this even mean? What is the subtext here? Because your company (which one?) is regarded as high status (higher than Alibaba?) / serious about data protection (but then you say it sells personal data?) ?
The practice of your company has no bearing of the practice of Alibaba. Alibaba could be better, Alibaba could also be worse.
Disclosure: I'm a Chinese working oversea and am genuinely interested in reacquaint myself with the business practice in China.
I've just launched https://www.gifsonic.com for resizing animated GIFs, and I'm still trying to figure out how useful it is...
Out of curiosity, what library is your saas backed by?
GIFs resized with FFmpeg will look great if everything is set up correctly, but if you need other effects it gets really tricky.
I work for Alibaba Cloud. Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're interested in the opportunities. Yes, we have office in Seattle (Bellevue).
It's why EA has an office in Vancouver/Burnaby (http://www2.ea.com/locations/vancouver), or Microsoft has an office in Tel Aviv/Ra'anana (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mtc/locations/telaviv.aspx) not to mention another one in Tel Aviv/Herzliya, etc.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/imag...
The best part is, you call your image with specific parameters that'll do transformations on the fly. For example,
<image url>/image.jpg?s=120
Using various query params, you can then control a bunch of transformations to the images that are applied on the fly when requested.
It's really fast and can do image resize on the fly. They wrote the engine in C and Assembly. Should be way faster than ImageMagick.
And I don't trust them much either but at least they answer to corporations if not the people.
An ICP licence is issued according to mainland policy, requirements bot exclusive to including having legal entity/people and agreeing to be part of the Golden Shield which extends far from China's firewall but also personal information tracking, both online and offline.
This is different than the CA system, which verifies the _server_, not the content being served. A compromised server or successful MitM allows an attacker to modify data undetected.
This is also different from subresource integrity---it's a step in the right direction, but that only helps with third-party resources being loaded, and it doesn't at all help with cryptographic signatures.
Having signatures also helps with the case of programs constantly being updated outside the users' control. JavaScript programs are almost always ephemeral---they load with a webpage, and disappear when you leave, barring certain caching. "Updates" aren't really updates---you are re-downloading the program every time. So, hashes will change, and without cryptographic signatures, you can't be sure whether the new hash should even be trusted.
As a separate benefit, this support would also be useful for authentication online and asserting one's identity on e.g. social media, especially decentralized/federated services.
example : your product displays news. Some of these might considered not acceptable by the Chinese govt and cause you to get shut down or blocked
Once you start dealing with larger local companies though the politics begins.
Having spent a painfully slow 10 hours in the airport in Beijing let me appreciate just how much of the Internet breaks when you block the biggest sites. Serve up jQuery through googleapis.com? Not in China, you don't. Hope it wasn't doing any heavy lifting for you.
Anything useful for foreigners. Their policy is more about protectionism than censorship.
However they clearly prefer local startups and makes it generally difficult for foreign companies to purely exploit the Chinese market. Joint ventures are always required at the least.
I doubt Alibaba would ever care about protecting your data.
Sources tell me that the azure infrastructure there are not actually operated by microsoft, but by a subcontractor, and merely licenses the name from microsoft. I would be quite wary of assuming that microsoft policies apply there.
My company will never trust any chinese company with anything especially our data.
Be less naive when it comes to China.
Airbus to sue over US-German spying row
Heh, you're using a throw away account just to go full whataboutism on this comment thread. So brave.
Are Wumao into Hacker News now?
Sure, China might be more blatant about that and do it on a higher level, but the US lost all rights to be on the moral high ground with things like that. The US got zero protection for user data. They do read your personal mail and they listen and watch via your webcam silently into your home. Does not get much worse than that.
If they did this, which company benefited? Did all domestic companies in the same business get the same deal or only that one single lucky one?
In 2013 some Snowden papers showed how the CIA spied on the Brazilian oil company Petrobras: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...
The same papers included a 2009 proposal that the CIA move into industrial espionage: https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use.... The CIA says it was never acted on.
And there is the Airbus issues too (which were purely to benefit Boeing - there was no military or defense issues with that)
However, the official position is that the US spy agencies don't do industrial espionage: https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-did-doj-indict-chinese-milit...
One has to say their actions don't make this particularly clear though.
But don't kid yourselves that the US intelligence would never pass on trade secrets or confidential information to benefit American competitors. Especially if you consider that they've actually sabotaged foreign companies because of business relations to countries the US doesn't like.
FWIW: I would never put confidential information on Chinese infra. But as a non-American I'm only slightly less worried about doing the same with American infra. It's not so much about whether someone will access your confidential information, it's more about who they are.
Are there known instances of this happening? How do you know they would "absolutely do that"?
This holds neither for the USA nor china.
I'm neither Chinese nor American. While it's obvious why China is not trustworthy (i.e. rampant product piracy) the bar is not so high that it matters whether the Americans or the Chinese are abusing my customers' data as long as there's a third option. Granted, even when hosting locally it's known that American agencies might be able to access that data and it would be prudent to assume China (or Russia, seeing how they're the more trendy Big Bad these days) couldn't do the same. But at least I'm not wrapping everything up with a ribbon and leaving it at their doorstep.
What kind of piracy? Patents and copyrights are managed and enforced at the state level.
I'm less concerned about Chinese knock-offs sold locally but Chinese companies have a deserved reputation for trying to sell illegal knock-offs internationally with little regard for the IP they're violating in those countries.
Also China has a reputation for not just having companies copy successful designs but actively going out and exfiltrating information to clone them (e.g. companies producing parts in China for Western companies turning around and producing knock-offs of those parts themselves, sometimes even branding them identically).
Regardless of the case by case legality, it's obvious why this behavior is likely undesirable for most Western companies seeking a cloud provider rather than specifically a Chinese cloud provider.
[0]: Obvious caveat: it's not strictly international, but most countries have agreed on cooperating under the terms of the Berne Convention and the UCC. So for most intents and purposes as long as you're only dealing with signatory states, copyright is as international as laws can be without the UN literally being able to come in and put you in UN jail (which isn't really a thing either).
At some point I'll look at what data it is sending out, and how often. Many people have Chinese apps on their phones as many utilities in the Play store originate there. If you watch where they're communicating to you can see that it is Beijing. Just as most apps talk to various servers in the US.
I'd uninstall any chinese made app if you care about privacy
Tencent Cloud: https://www.qcloud.com/?lang=en Baidu Cloud (Chinese only): https://cloud.baidu.com/ Netease/163 Cloud (Chinese only): https://www.163yun.com/
I use Tencent Cloud for a small China-oriented SaaS. The SDK APIs are kind of a mess/lacking, but the service is otherwise pretty reliable and easy to use.
You could just as easily bring your own or deploy a LetsEncrypt certificate to a bare machine though.
That said, I'm curious about demand/non-SaaS-oriented use of these computing platforms.
You can get by with most things but I've found that you really need someone who can read Chinese to use it properly.
And yes, there are all sorts of bureaucratic surprises that will make your blood boil.
Also, back of the napkin math, but GCE is even cheaper.
Alibaba Cloud ($79.00/mo)
2 Core CPU
8GB Memory
80GB SSD
Google Compute Engine - Taiwan Region ($69.81/mo)
n1-standard-2 (2 vCPUs / 7.5 GB Memory)
80 GB SSD diskIt's not about the price, it's about the Great Firewall of China.
Could anyone explain the sudden excitement about their service?
Show HN: VPS Comparison – Automated tests to compare VPS by yourself | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538
----- Dear Vultr Customer,
Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance.
In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.
How could you carry a balance there anyway? Was considering using Vultr at one point.
Saw the email and scrambled as fast as possible to contact their support and close all my accounts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Cloud#Data_Center_Loca...
I think that's a false equivalence - the TLAs might have access to your data, but are unlikely to look at it/act upon it except when your company/users run afoul of the law. It seems China is much more proactive in this regard - actively policing speech, etc. OTOH, given the political situation in the US, one can't rule out a slide towards parity with the situation in China, and indeed it seems pretty likely to me.
Yes, "speech" that is illegal because it is damaging to the ruling class.
See: Snowden, Manning, Assange.
However, it is not entirely unreasonable to compare the end results. There is definitely a chilling effect in the USA, effecting many of the very people who are best in a position to blow a whistle. And that this has been accomplished without the appearance of a draconian overreach is itself part of that chill.
These two (and other) methods of state violence against expression are worth considering when choosing a region for a cloud services provider.
Perhaps with individual whistle blowers, but definitely not with the press. I agree the USA is nowhere near perfect, and I always fear it will become more like China rather than say much of western europe (which still is far from perfect).
> These two (and other) methods of state violence against expression are worth considering when choosing a region for a cloud services provider.
If you want to associate with a better run state for your cloud service region, you have much better options than China. Not that Alibaba is bad at all, I have friends who work there and it seems to be a decent company by Chinese standards.
To outside observers, specially, to those who pay you to say those things, it is obvious that you have been framed because of what they said and they tell their media to report accordingly.
In a similar vain, china lacks rule of law. Rather they practice rule by law, where laws are used to control the public (if they want to get you, they'll find a laws you've probably broken) vs. having everyone, including officials who haven't fallen out of favor, subject evenly to them. So even westerner developed democracies aren't perfect in their practice of rule of law, but in china it isn't even a goal (like they have rejected constitutional law).
And I agree with jMyles that the chilling effect of it all is bad as is. Still, it could be worse.
The same could be argued for china. You are just splitting hairs.
> It seems China is much more proactive in this regard - actively policing speech, etc.
Policing speech? It happens on american social media. Even on hackernews.
Many of the laws affecting internet usage are nasty in the US too - you'll have a lot better luck torrenting, firing security scans or hosting certain leaked documents using a Chinese provider than a US one for example.
(Note: I work on Terraform)
So far, you can't really claim that you've ever designed a global platform because your stuff clearly doesn't work in mainland China. Think about it - 95% of all US services you can think of does _not_ work there, google.com/GCE/most AWS/golang.org/docker etc. For $30/year you get a chance to battle the GFW and the ability to build something truly work in all major markets.
What else besides EC2 and S3?
Base services are OK (computing, object storage, load balancers), CDN is actually quite good.
They are rolling out new services very quickly but the quality is still far from the AWS standards and feature rollout is slow outside of China (for instance, no way to replicate a bucket from Europe to Hong Kong).
Support is cheap, quite reactive but not very helpful.
ruby SDK is not very helpful (wasn't translated in English until recently, last upgrade removed the object storage SDK from the unified CLI to a dedicate one which is still in beta...).
So it cannot really compare with AWS globally, but for China mainland it might be the best provider. And they are moving very fast.
In addition, you must have an ICP license to use most if not all of the services they offer within mainland China. While Alibaba offers ICP registration, it is a partially political process and the requirements can change at any time (and can be different depending on who you are or who you talk to).
You must also consider the likelihood that your data and your users' data is exposed to the Chinese government. We only use Aliyun to serve users in China and are careful about what kind of IP we store there.
I've been wondering for a while
* does it mean if I use boto3 (python library for AWS), but with a different enpoint (which I know can be overrided as we do this for our CI tests) and only do basic operations (put content/get content) I do not have to switch to an other library ?
* The comparison does not mention things like presigned url (in order to share private content for a limited amount of time), what is the situation on it for OSS?
* Does Aliyun engineer works on closing the gap ?
If you want to create new cloud I would rather shoot for cheaper egress as this may give you an edge in many data transfer intensive applications.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/gartner-puts-aws-microsoft-azur...
Disclosure: I work for Alibaba Cloud. Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're interested in the opportunities. Yes, we have office in Seattle (Bellevue).
But now, there is no need.
tl;dr it's pretty good, if you know AWS this'll be OK, their support is competent.
This doesn't look like a serious contender with AWS.
Wonder what OLAP features it providers above the managed & massively-parallel SQL like in BigQuery
- "based on the instance rental fee" - "Tell us what you think about this page and win $10 credit! " - "Instance Fee, Storage fee and Public Traffic fee"
Max password length 20 characters.... um ok.
Fill in details, hit sign up button.
Network busy please try again later, for your sign up form, really?
Not what I want to see when onboarding a hosting provider
Most of the regulatory requirements only come into play if you are not only hosted in Germany but also target German customers (e.g. offer your services in German language to residents of Germany) at which point where you are hosted only affects how easy it is to make you comply with those regulations.
Sure, this is a bad choice if you're Facebook and don't want to have to deal with those pesky customer rights and be able to abuse all your users' data without their consent, but I'd rather have a cloud provider with a DC I can hold accountable and plenty of German companies are willing to pay a premium for that vs the typically much cheaper US DCs.
Sounds strange to me.
But their marketing just reaks of my local cable promotion offers that I get in the mail (selling really bad products with horrible gimmicks).
"Only 39.99/mo for the first 6 months"
And then it's like $210/mo after that.
And they only ever put the $210 in size 8 font on the back of the advertisement.
It's a great way to test out their infrastructure, sure. But the $300 credit they offer could afford the same experience.
Coming into an already highly competitive market with a gimmick like that and overall pricing that is double that of your competitors does not sound like a recipe for success imho.
I was really excited about a new competitor in the cloud space but was immediately turned off when I clicked through to their pricing page (after reading the offers on the homepage).
Best is HK though, is that region not included?
HK wasn't in the list (I pasted the list directly). For some reason hosting in HK is generally more expensive than nearby places like Taipei or Tokyo. Not sure why.
My throughput isn't bad, I can very occasionally get up to 2mb/s download speed but it's usually around 500-600.