
Alibaba Cloud growing fast, but still far behind AWS and other market leaders - navinsylvester
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/06/alibaba-cloud-growing-like-gangbusters-but-still-far-behind-aws-and-other-market-leaders/
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oger
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.

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gaius
_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?

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lovemenot
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.

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whb07
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.

~~~
Canada
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.

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

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the-dude
I think it is their 2013 acquisition of Softlayer?

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

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sitepodmatt
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.

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cthalupa
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...

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thisisit
> _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.

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bschwindHN
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/](https://www.sbcloud.co.jp/)

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spyckie2
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.

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

AWS has two regions in China

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mrep
Link for those curious:
[https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/](https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/)

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jbchoo
Is there a firebase similar product offered by Alicloud?

