
Alibaba Cloud - paulmach
https://www.alibabacloud.com
======
david90
>
> [https://www.alibabacloud.com/customers/strikingly](https://www.alibabacloud.com/customers/strikingly)

> As an international website building platform, obtaining an ICP license for
> China is very important to our users. The actual process of obtaining an ICP
> license though is quite complex. With Alibaba Cloud’s built-in and easy-to-
> follow ICP application process, it has helped with our user experience a
> lot.

Seems like it's killer feature is China ICP license made easy.

~~~
cmahler7
Does anyone have an explanation for why China is so successful? We have it
pounded into our heads that we need globalization in the form of open markets
with no protectionism for US companies and immigration, yet china almost
completely locks out foreign businesses and takes next to no immigrants and is
obviously a quickly growing global superpower.

~~~
thablackbull
> We have it pounded into our heads that we need globalization in the form of
> open markets with no protectionism

Because that is false. It works for developed markets with existing strong
industries. Dieter Frisch - former Director General for Development at the
European Commission says in his La politique de développement de l'Union
européenne [1], on page 38 of the PDF:

"En effet, on ne connaît historiquement aucun cas où un pays au stade précoce
de son évolution économique se serait développé via son ouverture à la
concurrence internationale. Le développement s’est toujours amorcé au gré
d’une certaine protection qu’on a pu diminuer au fur et à mesure que
l’économie s’était suffisamment fortifiée pour affronter la concurrence
extérieure. Mais un tel processus s’étend sur de longues années, sans parler
du préalable que constituent, dans le cas des ACP, la mise en place et le
fonctionnement de structures régionales."

Essentially, it means that there are no cases of a country that developed
through opening its economy to international competition. It always required
protectionism which reduces gradually overtime as it is able to grow and
absorb and compete with external competition. Haven't you noticed third world
countries that attempt to follow America's advice never escape the poverty
trap? What works for America does not imply it'll work for other countries.

[1] [http://ecdpm.org/wp-content/uploads/PMR-15-Politique-
Develop...](http://ecdpm.org/wp-content/uploads/PMR-15-Politique-
Developpement-Union-Europeenne-2008.pdf)

~~~
jpatokal
Excuse my French, but bullshit.

Consider Thailand and Malaysia, two neighbouring countries in SE Asia. In
Thailand, they opened up markets to car manufacturers and suppliers, with the
result that Thailand is now one of Asia's largest car manufacturing hubs. In
Malaysia, they imposed protectionist barriers and tried to build their own
cars. Ever heard of Proton or Perodua? No? There's a reason you haven't --
they're terrible.

~~~
ethbro
Per Wikipedia [1] the successful Thai auto industry is a perfect example of
using protective tarrifs to develop one's economy. They slapped huge tarrifs
on imports, then shifted to taxing fully-assembled imports to grow their parts
manufacturing, then gradually eased restrictions after they'd been able to
develop a superior domestic parts manufacturing industry.

Protective taxes. Domestic growth. Expertise. Drop taxes and start telling
everyone else how great free trade is.

It's a pretty winning playbook.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_Thail...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_Thailand#History)

~~~
eitally
This is what Brazil does and it is definitely not winning.

~~~
stelonix
It was definitely working for a good part of the time. Mismanagement in other
areas does not imply the recession was caused by protectionism. Actually,
there are several different reasons for the Brazilian recession, yet none of
them has anything to do with a "closed" market.

------
kevinsd
I have been missing a feature from Alibaba Cloud that AWS does not provide and
there seems no easy replacement: Their Object Storage Service (OSS) provides
an endpoint for transforming images (resizing/thumbnailing, compressing etc).
Putting it behind a CDN (which is also integrated in the feature), this solves
virtually all the image processing requirements ever needed in a common web or
mobile application. [https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-
detail/44687.htm?spm=a...](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-
detail/44687.htm?spm=a3c0i.o44686en.b99.297.7d6dfaf8QjDwzO)

~~~
wener
Please don't trust any Chinese company will protect your data, because even my
company will sale or buy some personal data, we will gather as much data as we
can.

~~~
2pointsomone
Hey that's not cool. How can you just disqualify a company that way just
because they are Chinese? Alibaba is an excellent company with a lot of
integrity.

~~~
arihant
I think the trust deficit towards Chinese companies is due to their
government. The government can just force their companies to hand over all
data. They already do for their own citizens.

~~~
dirktheman
As opposed to the US...?

~~~
jjeaff
In the US, there is due process. Granted, that due process has been seriously
eroded over the years in cases where the government can claim terrorism, but
otherwise, it still takes a court order to force a company to comply with a
government request for information.

~~~
zorked
Is due process that has been eroded over the years still due process? Where do
we draw the line?

~~~
weberc2
There's no need to draw a line; it's a risk continuum. With no due process at
all, China is a higher risk option than three US.

~~~
weberc2
*the US

Thanks autocorrect!

------
JohnTHaller
Don't serve any javascript from within China to users outside of China.
Remember when the Chinese government used the great firewall of China to
modify Baidu analytics javascript passing through it to setup an international
DDoS against github? Hosting your stuff in mainland China for consumption
outside make you a party to that happening again in the future.

~~~
apetresc
Why would it matter? Surely if the Chinese government was able to MITM the JS
to do bad stuff, they could also MITM the HTML to serve Javascript even if you
originally weren't?

~~~
computerex
So don't serve any content from China, is what I am hearing.

~~~
noir_lord
I trust the chinese government less than western governments.

And I don't trust them much either but at least they answer to corporations if
not the people.

~~~
EduardoBautista
They just let someone die in prison for fighting for human rights.

------
EZ-E
A concern is that if ever your product on this platform gets big, friction
with the (often unpredictable) Chinese gov and policies will become a
liability.

example : your product displays news. Some of these might considered not
acceptable by the Chinese govt and cause you to get shut down or blocked

~~~
jonmaim
Any content hosted outside China is very slow for chinese users. So if you're
serious about serving content in Mainland China, you will first need to obtain
an ICP license. Only then you will be able to use the Mainland CDN and cloud
instances.

~~~
gonyea
Azure in Hong Kong is quite zippy. Even in the depths of inner-China. I was
very impressed... and I'd rather host my stuff with Microsoft.

I doubt Alibaba would ever care about protecting your data.

~~~
gscott
Any company that cares about protecting your data can't operate in China.

~~~
honestoHeminway
Not Sure Agree

------
gentro
Don't forget there's also:

Tencent Cloud:
[https://www.qcloud.com/?lang=en](https://www.qcloud.com/?lang=en) Baidu Cloud
(Chinese only): [https://cloud.baidu.com/](https://cloud.baidu.com/)
Netease/163 Cloud (Chinese only):
[https://www.163yun.com/](https://www.163yun.com/)

I use Tencent Cloud for a small China-oriented SaaS. The SDK APIs are kind of
a mess/lacking, but the service is otherwise pretty reliable and easy to use.

~~~
bluepeter
What payment service do you use for subscriptions? I'm in Shanghai and nothing
like Stripe (yet) here... without that infrastructure, it makes it tough.

~~~
awestroke
Have you looked at Alipay[1]?

[1]: [https://global.alipay.com/](https://global.alipay.com/)

~~~
bluepeter
Yeah of course, but they don't provide Stripe-like subscriptions (i.e.,
recurring payments). Ali just made a deal _with_ Stripe, so maybe ultimately
Stripe is the best bet.

------
nodesocket
Forgive me, but why not just use Google Compute Engine in the Taiwan region?
Can US citizens even signup and use Alibaba Cloud? I'm very skeptical about
using a Chinese based cloud provider given the current world situation.

Also, back of the napkin math, but GCE is even cheaper.

    
    
      Alibaba Cloud ($79.00/mo)
        2 Core CPU
        8GB Memory
        80GB SSD
    
      Google Compute Engine - Taiwan Region ($69.81/mo)
        n1-standard-2 (2 vCPUs / 7.5 GB Memory)
        80 GB SSD disk

~~~
wyred
I have a SaaS product hosted in Singapore. We have complaints from our China
clients about it being slow so we had to setup another production environment
in China.

It's not about the price, it's about the Great Firewall of China.

~~~
Darthy
Sounds like there is a market for a novel product so that to Chinese people
your service is fast as if inside China, but your infrastructure is actually
outside. Kind of like a bridge over the Great Firewall, but just for a
specific company. How could that be done, and would that be legal in China?

------
tristanj
What's new about this? Alibaba cloud has been around for 8 years, it's called
Aliyun in China (literally Ali-cloud). They didn't build datacenters in 7
countries overnight.

Could anyone explain the sudden excitement about their service?

~~~
Monotoko
They rebranded the international service.

~~~
problems
Also $30/year for a cheap virtual server from a pretty major provider is nice.
I'll probably pick one up just for some network testing purposes.

~~~
dyu-
That cheap $30/year server turns to $200+ per year after the 1st. Go for vultr
at $2.5/month. It has been good thus far.

~~~
cheapsteak
I closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them

\----- Dear Vultr Customer,

Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance.

In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our
billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on
file in 24 hours.

~~~
7ewis
You were $5.94 in debt, so they decided to take $275? Bit extreme...

How could you carry a balance there anyway? Was considering using Vultr at one
point.

~~~
cheapsteak
I don't know either, I bought a vps, left it there for a year and kind of
forgot about it

Saw the email and scrambled as fast as possible to contact their support and
close all my accounts.

~~~
devicenull
How much was the VPS you purchased?

------
iliketosleep
It looks like a great offering, but it also means that in all likelihood,
you'd be sharing your data with the Chinese government - which may or may not
be a problem depending on your business.

~~~
problems
Yeah - it's an interesting conundrum, but it's not like similar doesn't happen
with US providers - it's pretty much commonplace here given taps in DCs and
under-the-table agreements, "Room 641A" and all such things.

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
>it's not like similar doesn't happen with US providers

I think that's a false equivalence - the TLAs might have access to your data,
but are unlikely to look at it/act upon it except when your company/users run
afoul of the law. It seems China is much more proactive in this regard -
actively policing speech, etc. OTOH, given the political situation in the US,
one can't rule out a slide towards parity with the situation in China, and
indeed it seems pretty likely to me.

~~~
anotherbrownguy
>actively policing speech

Yes, "speech" that is illegal because it is damaging to the ruling class.

See: Snowden, Manning, Assange.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Note there speech wasn't criminalizes in itself. No press got prosecuted for
relaying their speech. Let's not pretend restrictions on free speech are
anywhere near equivalent in scale between the two countries.

~~~
anotherbrownguy
Constitution of China also gives citizens freedom of speech, freedom of press
etc. It's not criminalized. It's just that if you say something damaging, they
will find something else that you violated for which you have to go to jail.

To outside observers, specially, to those who pay you to say those things, it
is obvious that you have been framed because of what they said and they tell
their media to report accordingly.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Chinese constitution says a lot, but china does not practice constitutional
law: judges are not allowed to base decisions on the constitution and
definitely are not allowed to use the constitution as the basis for overriding
official law.

In a similar vain, china lacks rule of law. Rather they practice rule by law,
where laws are used to control the public (if they want to get you, they'll
find a laws you've probably broken) vs. having everyone, including officials
who haven't fallen out of favor, subject evenly to them. So even westerner
developed democracies aren't perfect in their practice of rule of law, but in
china it isn't even a goal (like they have rejected constitutional law).

~~~
anotherbrownguy
I don't see how that makes China different from any other country.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It isn't binary of course. Rule of law is a goal for western countries, it
isn't for China, where the CCP has publicly said (a) constitutional law is not
appropriate for China and (b) a separate independent judiciary is not
appropriate for China. In that case, the CCP simply does not subscribe to rule
of law as a concept appropriate for use in the country.

------
mitchellh
If you're interested in trying this out in a more advanced capability beyond
the UI, Alibaba maintains official support for Terraform:
[https://github.com/alibaba/terraform-
provider](https://github.com/alibaba/terraform-provider)

(Note: I work on Terraform)

~~~
nodesocket
You are Terraform :-)

------
dis-sys
It is a pretty cool offering, for $30/year, you get to experience the GFW by
sitting comfortably in your bay area fancy house.

So far, you can't really claim that you've ever designed a global platform
because your stuff clearly doesn't work in mainland China. Think about it -
95% of all US services you can think of does _not_ work there,
google.com/GCE/most AWS/golang.org/docker etc. For $30/year you get a chance
to battle the GFW and the ability to build something truly work in all major
markets.

~~~
kanonk
What is GFW?

~~~
lorenzhs
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall)

------
MikeDoesCode
When I was working with AliCloud I ran into an issue in that during peak
hours, we'd want to scale-up, and they'd be "out of stock" of virtual
instances... Which is fine if you have the budget to keep a load of instances
running, but if your spike goes over what you expected, there's no resource
left for you to scale up. Not sure if that's still the case, but scalability
is perhaps the biggest draw for me to the cloud and it seemed AliCloud didn't
really get that right.

------
analyst74
Wow, the offering seems fairly comprehensive, they even have 2 data ceters in
US. Have anybody used them? how do they compare to AWS or GCP?

~~~
modarts
Don't have near the breadth of services of an AWS.

~~~
rifung
How many services do people on AWS usually use?

What else besides EC2 and S3?

~~~
p0rkbelly
Lambda. API Gateway. CloudFront. ELB. RDS. Redshift. Route 53. Athena. EMR.
Kinesis. Dynamo. KMS.

~~~
qmarchi
And this is what we call Vendor Lock-In. </sarcasm>

~~~
modarts
Sometimes the lockin feels good. We pay a lot, but get a fuckton of value from
AWS because of the well-designed ecosystem of infra products.

------
gondo
"Great Firewall as a service" :)

~~~
dis-sys
extra protection for free, no NSA access!

------
zbruhnke
it seems interesting that noone notes just how much their wording is almost
identical to AWS's - they even call their "container service" ECS instances -
That feels like something that will sit poorly with Amazon

~~~
pducks32
I was just about to comment that. Even their console url is similar.

~~~
brianwawok
That is the Chinese way. What can you do about it? Sue them?

------
allan_s
After reading this comparison between AWS S3 apis and Aliyun OSS apis
[https://www.alibabacloud.com/forum/read-148](https://www.alibabacloud.com/forum/read-148)

I've been wondering for a while

    
    
      * does it mean if I use boto3 (python library for AWS), but with a different enpoint (which I know can be overrided as we do this for our CI tests) and only do basic operations (put content/get content) I do not have to switch to an other library ?
      * The comparison does not mention things like presigned url (in order to share private content for a limited amount of time), what is the situation on it for OSS?
      * Does Aliyun engineer works on closing the gap ?
    
    

As s3 is a very popular (if not the most) aws-specific service (compared to
things like RDS which are transparent in your application code), at least for
me, not having to change library in my code would be a big cost saver.

~~~
evv
I haven't used this, but minio.io seems to be a nice open source S3 interface
and implementation.

------
djsumdog
I always thought it'd be funny to setup TOR exit nodes within china and tunnel
traffic to them. People get on TOR to get past censorship, and if they connect
to an exit node within China, suddenly they can't get to anything. It'd be the
ultimate asshole/trolling.

------
jakozaur
New cloud appears and their pricing mimics AWS and Alibaba Cloud is no
different. Compute and storage is cheap, egress to internet is expensive.

If you want to create new cloud I would rather shoot for cheaper egress as
this may give you an edge in many data transfer intensive applications.

------
uptownhr
Network busy, please try again later....
[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNoHDmdynXAr9ahtyo2GjAe4iKtzDDC1dEBQbN...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNoHDmdynXAr9ahtyo2GjAe4iKtzDDC1dEBQbNXLQkmvr)

~~~
nkkollaw
Same here. What is that?

~~~
Ylodi
Are You trying with some free e-mail address? I had problems with Gmail
address but not with my biz e-mail.

~~~
nkkollaw
Nope. My website's email address.

------
wanghq
Seeing few comments about how Alibaba Cloud is doing. It's ranked at the 4th
position on Gatner's latest magic quadrant.

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/gartner-puts-aws-microsoft-
azur...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/gartner-puts-aws-microsoft-azure-top-of-
its-magic-quadrant-for-iaas/)

Disclosure: I work for Alibaba Cloud. Drop me an email (in my profile) if
you're interested in the opportunities. Yes, we have office in Seattle
(Bellevue).

~~~
sah2ed
You could have linked directly to the source.

[https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2G2O5FC&ct=150519](https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2G2O5FC&ct=150519)

~~~
wanghq
Thanks. Somehow my search didn't find this.

------
atemerev
In the fine days of Chinese Bitcoin trading domination, I used them to host my
algo trading servers (as OKCoin servers were also held there).

But now, there is no need.

------
davidgerard
We use AWS a lot and we're using this for our China-based stuff.

tl;dr it's pretty good, if you know AWS this'll be OK, their support is
competent.

------
crispytx
How unoriginal can you get? We're sort of like the Amazon of China, why don't
we get into cloud computing too?

------
sangd
Clicking Buy for web hosting leads me to a Chinese website:
[https://ews.console.aliyun.com/buy.htm?spm=a3c0i.149865.7761...](https://ews.console.aliyun.com/buy.htm?spm=a3c0i.149865.776125.1.47a80c28EWh5Z5&site=intl)

This doesn't look like a serious contender with AWS.

~~~
bobbles
Aliyun is Alibabs cloud computing unit so i dont know what else youd expect?

------
michael-go
The OLAP "Analytics DB" looks interesting
[https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/analytic-
db](https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/analytic-db)

Wonder what OLAP features it providers above the managed & massively-parallel
SQL like in BigQuery

------
wickedlogic
Something that struck me, is the wording is surprisingly unwordy for a cloud
provider...

\- "based on the instance rental fee" \- "Tell us what you think about this
page and win $10 credit! " \- "Instance Fee, Storage fee and Public Traffic
fee"

------
strin
Interesting. That means your data gets extra Great Firewall protection :)

------
Cub3
So I tried to sign up for the $300 credit.

Max password length 20 characters.... um ok.

Fill in details, hit sign up button.

Network busy please try again later, for your sign up form, really?

Not what I want to see when onboarding a hosting provider

------
jdubs
The only European region is in Germany which makes regulatory requirements a
bit more difficult. I wonder why they went there rather than Ireland.

~~~
Geee
What's wrong with Germany?

~~~
eb0la
Germany has one of the strictest data privacy agency (and laws) in this
planet.

~~~
lorenzhs
As a German citizen, that's a feature, not a bug.

------
liuxiaobo
All the information of Alibaba is controlled and monitored by Chinese
Government. Never trust a company controlled by a Autocracy.

------
bArray
I must be missing something - are these prices considered competitive? At
least for a straight VM I think I can do better?

------
xiconfjs
"The peak bandwidth for ECS instances from the ECS Package is 50Mbps. This
cannot be modified by the user."

Sounds strange to me.

~~~
brianwawok
They dont want to host a CDN or a torrent tracker or a tor exit node that
degrades the service for others. Seems like a feature.

------
gobengo
Do you think this is powered by OpenStack? I know Alibaba uses/used OpenStack
internally.

~~~
wanghq
As far as I know, Alibaba Cloud doesn't use OpenStack at all.

------
nkkollaw
I tried signing up and it says "Network busy, please try again later"..?

------
dyu-
Note that they need your credit card info even with their free 1 year plan.

~~~
m3adow
Similar to AWS and GCE in this regard if I'm not mistaken.

------
banach
Can I host a blog that criticizes Putin on one of these servers?

~~~
katasourcing
You can do that, and there are tons of blogs have already done that in China.

------
lucaspottersky
well, I guess China isn't that cheap anymore...

------
du_bing
Hi there, I am a Web Developer in China, if you want to build websites for
Chinese and pass ICP examination, you can contact me, I will help you with
that.

------
always_good
Not a great first impression: Never got the confirmation email after two
attempts to two different email services.

~~~
dyu-
Was in the same boat. Their popup looks like they already sent it after
registration. But you need to manually hit the "Send" button on the popup to
trigger it.

~~~
always_good
Heh, thanks. That is some rough UX. Their "Send SMS" is even worse -- needs 3
clicks to actually send. :)

------
Punisher
The offering seems fairly comprehensive, they even have 2 data centers in US.
Has anybody used them?

------
5_minutes
This is pretty neat, $30/year. I find it admirable from them to do this
(mimicking AWS).

~~~
flyGuyOnTheSly
Yea it says that on their homepage, but when you click pricing the cheapest
server available (at least on the pricing page) is $10/mo

~~~
gondo
$30/year is a special offer. there is a link on top of the pricing page "SSD
Cloud Server up to 84% Off. Start deploying." it leads to the page with
offers: [https://www.alibabacloud.com/campaign/ecs-ssd-cloud-
server](https://www.alibabacloud.com/campaign/ecs-ssd-cloud-server)

~~~
flyGuyOnTheSly
Wow... yea that's a great offer.

But their marketing just reaks of my local cable promotion offers that I get
in the mail (selling really bad products with horrible gimmicks).

"Only 39.99/mo for the first 6 months"

And then it's like $210/mo after that.

And they only ever put the $210 in size 8 font on the back of the
advertisement.

It's a great way to test out their infrastructure, sure. But the $300 credit
they offer could afford the same experience.

Coming into an already highly competitive market with a gimmick like that and
overall pricing that is double that of your competitors does not sound like a
recipe for success imho.

I was really excited about a new competitor in the cloud space but was
immediately turned off when I clicked through to their pricing page (after
reading the offers on the homepage).

