Alibaba Cloud growing fast, but still far behind AWS and other market leaders | Hacker News Reader

Alibaba Cloud growing fast, but still far behind AWS and other market leaders

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I am tracking AliYun / Alibaba Cloud for some time now. They are expanding internationally with strong pace. You would not ramp up that amount of Capex without sales momentum. I hear that Alibaba Cloud is gaining significant traction outside of China and offer a highly interesting solution for non-Chinese companies to provide services in China (even assisting their customers to obtain the necessary licenses). Their product portfolio in China is significantly larger than their international offering - but that is growing as well. I was at their Cloud conferences in Hangzhou twice in 2017 and 2016 and honestly I was blown away by the depth and quality of their portfolio. From AI / ML over cybersecurity to quantum computing they are doing the right moves. I remember impressive figures on their DDoS protection solution. And they can do IoT and.. and... and.... And their compute and storage platform is massively scalable. Just look up what levels of traffic Alibaba could handle on its ‚singles day‘ event (comparable to black friday and cyber monday - combined). So for me Alibaba Cloud definitely has the chops to become a global Top 3 player! Definitely comparable to AWS, GCP, Azure and a platform you should test. Happy to elaborate more - PM me.

Even if they have the chops they still have a long way to go, based on what I see online about them.

I've used AWS quite a bit, and they have amazing breadth and depth. After a few minutes of research for Alibaba Cloud, they seem to have the breadth but I'm not entirely convinced about their depth. The documentation is quite clear but quite narrow (they only seem to have a Python SDK?) and there doesn't seem to be much buzz online for their platform, though (i.e. blog posts about them, forum comments; most of the Google results for searches about them return only alibabacloud.com pages).

In any case, more competition is better, so they're definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Re: "buzz online": in English, sure, but try searching for "阿里云 -site:aliyun.com" and you'll find a lot more.

If they're going for the international markets (China might be big, but Rest of the World >>> China), they also need buzz in English... Otherwise they're locking out 90% of the developers in the world.

True - but not too shure about the 90%.

offer a highly interesting solution for non-Chinese companies to provide services in China (even assisting their customers to obtain the necessary licenses)

Do you need a highly interesting solution with necessary licenses to use any other cloud in any other country?

It's a fair point. But licenses could be the right direction to go in future. Consider GDPR for doing business in Europe: that seems to be a good thing for data privacy. Cloud services that are licensed to provide GDPR assistance in Europe would be good for both clients and European consumers.

That’s not the point. You need them when you want to provide services in China. And it’s a non-trivial endeavor, especially for non-Chinese companies. Most multinationals face this challenge when providing online services for their Chinese customers - ranging from software distribution to content management. And you need to play by the rules in every jurisdiction around the globe. GDPR is just another example, like it or not.

Publishing public pricing would be a good starter. Some bundles are advertised (copying Lightsail which copied Digital Ocean), but apparently actual pricing is hidden behind "Get Started For Free".

I have Aliyun in my mix of providers that we use..they do a pretty good job overall and imo are the best option for serving mainland China if that is a requirement...they alsp have good options for MENA

Their cloud offering is a joke. Terrible UI. terrible on boarding.

It took me over 30 minutes of trying to deploy a small vps just to find out my account was locked out as a brand new user.

The moment they said to mail them a copy of government ID and the like I just closed my account and never looked back.

Don’t use them.

Completely agree. It's crappy, expensive and on top of that it's the least trustworthy company to host with. Unless you need to be behind the great firewall I can't see any reason to touch them.

AWS is blocked in China so you're forced to use Alicloud. Friends who use it say it is hard to use and has bad documentation.

Maybe some parts of AWS are blocked in China some of the time in some places (the Great Firewall is not applied very consistently), but I have used AWS servers to play around with deep learning; connecting from China without a VPN worked fine.

Since Amazon probably uses most of their services themselves for their Chinese site, I'd be highly surprised if there were any large-scale bans in place. (Maybe you are thinking of Google Cloud?)

One thing to keep in mind that AWS wasn't as perfect at the beginning either. Maybe it's fair that the Chinese are giving their own service the same pioneering freedom as AWS had when it started. This isn't the part that confuses me, the part that confuses me is why isn't US reacting to all these bans, even now with Trump

AWS is not blocked but there are some inexplicable restrictions. Even with full licensing, you can't host a website on S3. And a ton of services are missing. Even SES which per the usual makes no sense. Welcome to the jungle.

>AWS is blocked in China so you're forced to use Alicloud.

AWS has two regions in China

Link for those curious: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/

I'm quite surprised that IBM has more market share than Google. Is there some legacy IBM stuff at play here?

IBM has bought a few cloud providers: Softlayer, Compose, Cloudant. Softlayer is probably the biggest of these.

I think it is their 2013 acquisition of Softlayer?

Yes, Softlayer would be the factor here, pity they have been slowly ruining it since acquisition

Second that. Lot of maintenance after acquisition has caused us one too many downtime. We already have sizeable presence in gce and the experience has been overall good so we have decided to migrate resources in softlayer over to gce.

Ah buyout history. if memory serves me correctly... EV1Server (Cobalt RaQ3s with 300gb data transfer / month - $99 back in early 2000s) -> ThePlanet ($39pm athlons with 1000gb data transfer mid 2000s) -> Softlayer (it started getting pricey) -> IBM (lets double prices and half the data transfer to 500gb). Unfortunately despite great automation devs they missed the software play in a massive way on the cloud front, kind of like Rackspace, kids nowadays will go OVH/Hetzner if they dare for bare metal.

You've got the history right. (Or mostly... For the first two, investors bought both companies and merged them into one brand. Technically, TP didn't buy EV1, SL didn't buy TP)

Going back a bit further, EV1Server wasn't even the original name. They rebranded from Rackshack! Wonder if there are any of those RaQs still plugged in and working somewhere, with people now paying that money to IBM decades later...

> While the majority of its business is in China and Asia more broadly, that is a huge market and gives Alibaba enough lift to grow fast and move up in the market more quickly. In another report from Synergy published last year, it found to no one’s surprise that the Chinese cloud market was dominated by Chinese cloud companies.

What are numbers to support that they have a big presence in Asian countries other than China? I checked the pdf it doesn't talk about country-wise segmentation.

There's SB cloud, which seems to be Softbank's joint venture with Alibaba Cloud. I don't have numbers for you though.

https://www.sbcloud.co.jp/

Is there a firebase similar product offered by Alicloud?

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