
Alibaba Plows $1B into Aliyun, Its Cloud Computing Unit - cool_story_bro_
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/29/alibillion/
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buss
For those wondering about the name, "yun" (云／雲) means "cloud" in Mandarin.

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eva1984
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.

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retroencabulato
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?

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eva1984
But arguably, Alibaba doesn't yet have a global audience as Amazon does, IMO.

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princeb
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.

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eva1984
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.

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arihant
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.

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nindalf
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.

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jpatokal
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](http://www.aliyun.com/?lang=en)

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fweespeech
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.

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rebootthesystem
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.economist.com/node/18928526)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2014/05/11/china-
can...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2014/05/11/china-can-
expropriate-alibabas-business-and-it-just-might/)

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/alibabas-political-
risk-14110598...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/alibabas-political-
risk-1411059836)

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

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roysimkes
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?

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rebootthesystem
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.

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wyldfire
> 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).

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

Like really weird.

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curiousjorge
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.

