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Alibaba Cloud
- always_good 9y agoNot a great first impression: Never got the confirmation email after two attempts to two different email services.
- dyu- 9y agoWas 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 9y agoHeh, thanks. That is some rough UX. Their "Send SMS" is even worse -- needs 3 clicks to actually send. :)
- analyst74 9y agoWow, 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?
- LeoPanthera 9y ago3 in the US. One in NJ, two in Silicon Valley.
- modarts 9y agoDon't have near the breadth of services of an AWS.
- tilolebo 9y agoI have been using them in China mainland for 2 years. Base services are OK (computing, object storage, load balancers), CDN is actually quite good. They are rolling out new services very quickly but the quality is still far from the AWS standards and feature rollout is slow outside of China (for instance, no way to replicate a bucket from Europe to Hong Kong). Support is cheap, quite reactive but not very helpful. ruby SDK is not very helpful (wasn't translated in English until recently, last upgrade removed the object storage SDK from the unified CLI to a dedicate one which is still in beta...). So it cannot really compare with AWS globally, but for China mainland it might be the best provider. And they are moving very fast.
- edaemon 9y agoAt my work we use them to host a static site and to serve streaming video content in China. We've also used the elastic compute service before. Their platform is surprisingly comprehensive and similar to AWS/Azure but is not perfect. Some parts of the interface do not have an English version and various services require "real-name" verification which requires a passport, etc. Even further some services require real-name verification from a Chinese national. In addition, you must have an ICP license to use most if not all of the services they offer within mainland China. While Alibaba offers ICP registration, it is a partially political process and the requirements can change at any time (and can be different depending on who you are or who you talk to). You must also consider the likelihood that your data and your users' data is exposed to the Chinese government. We only use Aliyun to serve users in China and are careful about what kind of IP we store there.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- iliketosleep 9y agoIt 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.
- tjpnz 9y agoWhich you could argue is true of most businesses given how much stuff is manufactured there.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
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- zitterbewegung 9y agoBut won't it provide competition in the cloud space to drive costs down ? Or will no one take it seriously ?
- problems 9y agoYeah - 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 9y ago>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.
- trumpownsyou 9y ago
- mitchellh 9y agoIf 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 9y agoYou are Terraform :-)
- jdubs 9y agoThe only European region is in Germany which makes regulatory requirements a bit more difficult. I wonder why they went there rather than Ireland.
- Geee 9y agoWhat's wrong with Germany?
- pluma 9y agoFrankfurt makes sense for European companies. Having it anywhere but Germany would also make it basically worthless for German companies because the cloud provider can't be expected to follow the laws German companies building their stacks on top of it would have to comply with. Most of the regulatory requirements only come into play if you are not only hosted in Germany but also target German customers (e.g. offer your services in German language to residents of Germany) at which point where you are hosted only affects how easy it is to make you comply with those regulations. Sure, this is a bad choice if you're Facebook and don't want to have to deal with those pesky customer rights and be able to abuse all your users' data without their consent, but I'd rather have a cloud provider with a DC I can hold accountable and plenty of German companies are willing to pay a premium for that vs the typically much cheaper US DCs.
- 5_minutes 9y agoThis is pretty neat, $30/year. I find it admirable from them to do this (mimicking AWS).
- flyGuyOnTheSly 9y agoYea 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 9y ago$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 9y agoWow... 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).
- singlow 9y agoIf you check the various data centers and non-windows operating systems, you'll find as low as $5.10/month. But their special offer allows you to get one server for $30/year for the first year prepaid. Kind of a crappy way to advertise a PAAS.
- 9y ago
- EZ-E 9y agoA 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
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoOr you end up competing with something booted up by someone powerful's kid. Operating in these systems is a totally different skill set from competing in international markets.
- EZ-E 9y agoYes, I forgot to mention that. If you're a foreign company and bringing some damaging competition to a Chinese local owned company, you better get ready for some trouble
- katasourcing 9y agoAny cases to elaborate? I know one from U.S., when Huawei was going to enter US markets.
- Monotoko 9y agoI actually work inside China in tech, it's not too bad if you're a foreigner serving mostly foreign companies who come into China. Once you start dealing with larger local companies though the politics begins.
- catmanjan 9y agoOr for example, there is any free text user input that could be subversive...
- jonmaim 9y agoAny 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.
- banach 9y agoCan I host a blog that criticizes Putin on one of these servers?
- katasourcing 9y agoYou can do that, and there are tons of blogs have already done that in China.
- likelynew 9y agoWhy would you do that?
- Bakary 9y agoI don't see why not.
- plandis 9y agoNow try hosting a blog that critics the Chinese government.
- zbruhnke 9y agoit 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 9y agoI was just about to comment that. Even their console url is similar.
- brianwawok 9y agoThat is the Chinese way. What can you do about it? Sue them?
- uptownhr 9y agoNetwork busy, please try again later.... https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNoHDmdynXAr9ahtyo2GjAe4iKtzDDC1dEBQbNXLQkmvr https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNoHDmdynXAr9ahtyo2GjAe4iKtzDDC1dEBQbN...
- sangd 9y agoClicking Buy for web hosting leads me to a Chinese website: https://ews.console.aliyun.com/buy.htm?spm=a3c0i.149865.776125.1.47a80c28EWh5Z5&site=intl https://ews.console.aliyun.com/buy.htm?spm=a3c0i.149865.7761... This doesn't look like a serious contender with AWS.
- bobbles 9y agoAliyun is Alibabs cloud computing unit so i dont know what else youd expect?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- madeofpalk 9y agoDo you think it would be more serious if you were Chinese?
- pcr0 9y agoDid you try clicking the globe in the header? You can view the page in English.
- lstamour 9y agoYou can switch languages in the header to view the checkout page in English: https://ews.console.aliyun.com/buy.htm?spm=a3c0i.149865.776125.1.47a80c28EWh5Z5&site=intl https://ews.console.aliyun.com/buy.htm?spm=a3c0i.149865.7761...
- gondo 9y ago"Great Firewall as a service" :)
- dis-sys 9y agoextra protection for free, no NSA access!
- tristanj 9y agoWhat'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?
- krf 9y agoMaybe the $300 new user credit or $30/year SSD cloud server is new. Probably not too many people knew about these things even if they weren't. Always fun to play around with something different at low or no cost. I actually didn't see too much excitement in the comments!!!
- jakobegger 9y ago30/year is just a promotion. After a year the price is almost 10x higher.
- Monotoko 9y agoThey rebranded the international service.
- problems 9y agoAlso $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.
- kevinsd 9y agoI 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=a3c0i.o44686en.b99.297.7d6dfaf8QjDwzO https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/44687.htm?spm=a...
- sadovmychyi 9y agoApp Engine from Google's cloud has such feature -- image transformations and CDN for them with dynamic resizing and some easy transforms from URL parameters.
- sanat 9y agoHere's a great blog post on how to use it. https://medium.com/google-cloud/uploading-resizing-and-serving-images-with-google-cloud-platform-ca9631a2c556 https://medium.com/google-cloud/uploading-resizing-and-servi...
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y agoHow's the pricing compared to https://www.imgix.com/pricing https://www.imgix.com/pricing or filepicker.io?
- ghayes 9y agoI add my support as Imgix being a great service.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoImgix is unbelievable. The filters are useful, the support is great but above all the prices are excellent.
- 9y ago
- dyu- 9y agoNote that they need your credit card info even with their free 1 year plan.
- nodesocket 9y agoForgive 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
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rifung 9y agoI believe that if you host it in Taiwan it would still have to go through the Chinese firewall if it were accessed in China.
- xir78 9y agoYeah that’s a different firewall :)
- wyred 9y agoI 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 9y agoSounds 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?
- Monotoko 9y agoThe connection from the mainland to Taiwan is really bad. Also Alibaba has reasonable international connections into and out of China, in the HK region for example I have a ping of 40 and have been running my own VPN for some time.
- gentro 9y agoDon'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.
- xir78 9y agoCan you add ssl certs to Tcloud now? That used to be a pita.
- gentro 9y agoThey have a certificate management system where you can register for a free one from TrustAsia, or buy an expensive one from another authority like Symantec. I just got a free one. You could just as easily bring your own or deploy a LetsEncrypt certificate to a bare machine though.
- bluepeter 9y agoWhat 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 9y agoHave you looked at Alipay[1]? [1]: https://global.alipay.com/ https://global.alipay.com/
- bluepeter 9y agoYeah 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.
- gentro 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- strin 9y agoInteresting. That means your data gets extra Great Firewall protection :)
- atemerev 9y agoIn 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.
- nkkollaw 9y agoI tried signing up and it says "Network busy, please try again later"..?
- xiconfjs 9y ago"The peak bandwidth for ECS instances from the ECS Package is 50Mbps. This cannot be modified by the user." Sounds strange to me.
- brianwawok 9y agoThey 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.
- dis-sys 9y agoIt 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.
- david90 9y ago> 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.
- ethbro 9y agoGee, I wonder why a country with notoriously tight control of information would help funnel business to a single domestic cloud infrastructure provider...
- smueller1234 9y agoIndeed, that would have been a killer feature for my employer a year ago. Don't forget, however, that the ICP license might just be the START of the Chinese business license gauntlet! If you do business other than basically just serving content, assume there's other licenses that need acquiring. Always get local help with this.
- baybal2 9y agoSo does Microsoft, but the QoS there is lower. Aliyun - send paper A, B, C to us and a payment, the license comes to office in 2 weeks Chinese Azure - send money to us A day after, send paper A there, paper B there, C there A week after - ChiComs come to the office questioning you why you omitted that thing in this paper, and give you nice time A few weeks later you get your papers. I do not see what they call a service there.
- laurent123456 9y agoAs often in China, the killer feature will probably be that the Chinese government is going to make it even harder for all the companies except their own to get a license.
- dccoolgai 9y ago
- jakozaur 9y agoNew 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.
- MikeDoesCode 9y agoWhen 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wanghq 9y agoSeeing 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-azure-top-of-its-magic-quadrant-for-iaas/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/gartner-puts-aws-microsoft-azur... 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 9y agoYou 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 9y agoThanks. Somehow my search didn't find this.
- plandis 9y agoBellevue is entirely a different city from Seattle. Your office is not in Seattle. From real Seattle the commute would actually be kind of bad (1hr+)
- wanghq 9y agoThanks for the clarification. I wanted to use Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area) so I don't need to explain where Bellevue is.
- allan_s 9y agoAfter 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 9y agoI haven't used this, but minio.io seems to be a nice open source S3 interface and implementation.
- davidgerard 9y agoWe 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.
- bArray 9y agoI must be missing something - are these prices considered competitive? At least for a straight VM I think I can do better?
- crispytx 9y agoHow unoriginal can you get? We're sort of like the Amazon of China, why don't we get into cloud computing too?
- lucaspottersky 9y agowell, I guess China isn't that cheap anymore...
- liuxiaobo 9y agoAll the information of Alibaba is controlled and monitored by Chinese Government. Never trust a company controlled by a Autocracy.
- michael-go 9y agoThe 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
- JohnTHaller 9y agoDon'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.
- dfguo 9y agoSince then, Baidu has been serving most of their assets through https to prevent hijacking.
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoHow confident are you that the Chinese government does not have the SSL keys for Baidu? Because I am 0% confident.
- apetresc 9y agoWhy 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?
- JohnTHaller 9y agoVery true. Heck, China could also modify images to take advantage of vulnerable libraries.
- computerex 9y agoSo don't serve any content from China, is what I am hearing.
- noir_lord 9y agoI 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.
- smokedoutraider 9y agolol, hosting data on a Chinese server. Yeah, no thanks. In all seriousness, this is a great solution if you are willing to participate in the oppressive, communist dystopia that is the Chinese economy. While the monitary incentives are definitely appealing, I can not in good conscience do business in such a disgusting political climate.
- smokedoutraider 9y agoHosting data on a Chinese server. Yeah, no thanks. In all seriousness, this is a great solution if you are willing to participate in the oppressive, communist dystopia that is the Chinese economy. While the monitary incentives are definitely appealing, I can not in good conscience do business in such a disgusting political climate.
- wickedlogic 9y agoSomething 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"
- djsumdog 9y agoI 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.
- Punisher 9y agoThe offering seems fairly comprehensive, they even have 2 data centers in US. Has anybody used them?
- gobengo 9y agoDo you think this is powered by OpenStack? I know Alibaba uses/used OpenStack internally.
- wanghq 9y agoAs far as I know, Alibaba Cloud doesn't use OpenStack at all.
- Cub3 9y agoSo 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
- du_bing 9y agoHi 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.
- popopobobobo 9y agoFolks, time to ramp up the racism. It is extremely political correct to fling all of our opinions onto you know who.