Alibaba Plows $1B into Aliyun, Its Cloud Computing Unit | Hacker News Reader

Alibaba Plows $1B into Aliyun, Its Cloud Computing Unit

techcrunch.com

For those wondering about the name, "yun" (云／雲) means "cloud" in Mandarin.

1B dollars for cloud business doesn't sound like a lot to me. In order to compete with Amazon/Google/MS they need to build data centers across the globe. And consider that, unlike its competitors whose cloud service benefit from the fact they can share the same underlying infrastructure that have already been set up for the company's businesses(retail/search), Alibaba's major focus and investment is still largely within China, the cost of their expansion will only be higher.

Superficially, the infrastructure needed to run Alibaba's retail website seems similar to the infrastructure needed to run Amazon's retail website.

What do you think Alibaba does?

Alibaba isn't a retailer like Amazon. They're a retail platform that serves ads. They're a lot more like Google than Amazon. Amazon actually makes money in retail, Alibaba makes no money in traditional retail (~95% of their sales and income come from ads).

Assuming a large portion of that comes from Taobao+Aliexpress, maybe eBay is a more apt comparison?

But arguably, Alibaba doesn't yet have a global audience as Amazon does, IMO.

Whole Russia and Belarus (and i bet rest of ex-USSR countries) shop on aliexpress/alibaba. I would say nor Amazon nor Alibaba has true global presence - each represented in few countries without overlaps (for now)

Iirc the largest online sales day in the world is Single's Day at Alibaba. Blows Black Friday out of the water. The tech capacity is impressive.

But it is reach we are talking about here. I am from China, so I understand how crazy Single's Day is and what an amazing job Alibaba has done to handle that amount traffic.

However, the overwhelming majority of Alibaba's customers is still Chinese. On the other hand, before AWS takes off, Amazon already sets up data centers in different countries and continents, because they are the leading online retailer over there. Same reason applies to Google. Their cloud business then cloud easily benefit from those established investments.

Their Storage and CDN pricing is extremely impressive. 8 cents a GB entry for US-based datacentre for transfer. 6 cents for China-based. 5 cents a GB for storage, almost flat.

If nothing else, I think global startups would at least find the CDN handly, starting today.

Also Beijing and HK nodes would be closest nodes to India. Although AWS has a node in India but I think it is Cloudfront only.

Agree with your other points, but the routing of undersea cables means that data centers in Singapore have lower latency to users in the Indian subcontinent. Also, Amazon recently announced that they plan to invest in data centers within India, so that's further incentive to stay with Amazon.

Having said that, its great to see more competition in this space and I hope Alibaba expands to more regions.

Ali's CDN comes with free anti-DDoS service, I find it super easy to use, you can limit traffic with a single click

Has anybody actually used these guys? Looks like they've still got a long way to go outside China -- even the English language page has a Chinese title, and virtually all the links point to Chinese-only pages.

http://www.aliyun.com/?lang=en

If you look at their map, they don't have enough presence outside of China to be much use. Only one PoP is outside of China.

Is anyone concerned that the Chinese government can potentially have unrestricted access to anything you store with them? Sorry to take that tack but I see no way to trust your data to a Chinese owned company. Remember that in China you don't actually own busineses, you exist at the pleasure of their government.

http://www.economist.com/node/18928526

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2014/05/11/china-can...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/alibabas-political-risk-14110598...

I wouldn't consider their cloud service for a microsecond, no matter how cheap it might be.

Are you not concerned that US government can potentially have unrestricted access to anything you store with Amazon, Google or Microsoft?

Or are we already accepted the fact that NSA knows everything anyway?

It is very different. Here you are, ultimately, protected by laws. As a user of a cloud service run by a Chinese company that on any given monday afternoon could be taken over in whole or in part by the Chinese government (without it becoming public), you have nothing.

If the deplorable state of intellectual property, human rights, labor laws, currency and market manipulation don't spell out what kind of a regime we are dealing with I don't know what will.

> ECS price is as low as [7.97USD]/month.

AFAICT this price is for 1 core, 1GB, non-windows OS, US data center. I just did a sanity check and this looks close to AWS' 7 USD/month for t2.micro (which I think is also 1 core, 1GB).

It's weird looking at that map from their prospective.

Like really weird.

The bigger question is how they plan on getting people to trust them over Amazon and Google. Maybe they might lure with significantly lower prices but I fear that might attract a very different type of crowd that would add to the infrastructure risk.

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