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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

With Alibaba launching their own hosting services as well, where do they stand at scale compared to Amazon? I realize Alibaba is mostly targeted inward to China, unlike Amazon that has some international markets, but are they a contender when it comes to global sales (and possibly China facing hosting?)

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Aliyun has been around for sometimes, and is now rebrand as Alibaba Cloud and expanding beyond China. It is competing with AWS, Google Cloud, Azure etc. And this August report says Alibaba Cloud has surpassed Digital Ocean to be number 2 in hosting. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2017/08/22/cloud-wars-ali...

Singles Day sales is a few times bigger than Black Friday or anything Amazon has. Kind of strange to ask if Alibaba Cloud can scale as AWS.

Actually, Aliyun built data centers all over the world, including the US, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America etc. It is the second largest IAAS, second to only AWS (yes it is bigger and growing faster than Google and Microsoft in IAAS).

That doesn't sound right, unless microsoft has been shrinking: https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/09/27/report-aws-leads-ia...

The data in your link is for 2016. It's the end of 2017 now. Alibaba Cloud is growing definitely much faster than Microsoft (126% vs 61%) and Google and bigger than Google. It is very close to Microsoft in terms of revenue if not bigger right now.

Source?

their latest quarterly report I believe

Would you have that data then? Also note that neither Google nor Microsoft break out their cloud computing revenues, making comparisons difficult, although you can figure out upper bounds by the nearest business unit.

Right, but MS was more than 2x the size at the end of last year, so Alibaba would need to continue that >100% growth, and MS would need to not grow at all. I doubt that's the case.

According to Bloomberg, Alibaba hit $675 million in sales for their cloud services for fiscal 2016. So they're likely comparable, or a bit larger than, Google presently (~1/2 the size of Azure and far behind AWS).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-10/microsoft...

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