Alibaba Cloud held its annual Gabfest last week, unveiling some tasty new cloud providers and billion-dollar “ecosystem improvements” aimed at uncovering more prospects outside of China.
This item represents an improvement to the Alibaba Cloud Enterprise Community (CEN), which in Model 2.zero allows 5,000 routes or 1,000+ digital non-public cloud attachments per transit router in the global community. Alibaba Cloud claims that Model 2.zero will allow the network to be 1,000 instances larger than its predecessor, all powered by cloud interfaces.
A network can contain local rigs worldwide or assets within an Alibaba Cloud region.
These consumable cloud storage can now consider ESSD Auto PL – Alibaba Cloud’s claimed block storage service that can provide up to 1 million IOPS per disk and reach 4GB/s. Alibaba Cloud touts the service, “allowing for computerized scaling in seconds to deal with…sudden surges in visitors.” Still, product documentation states: “On-demand efficiency provisioning is primarily used with predictable periodicity. Possibility of I/O visitors.”
So maybe not quite if every event doesn’t autoscale.
At the core of Alibaba Cloud’s launch is a “revised ecosystem technology” that can spend $1 billion over three years “to help peers in technological innovation and market expansion.”
The billion dollars includes “every monetary and non-financial incentive comparable to funding, rebates and listing programs.”
This appears to be a vanilla channel show.
However, Alibaba Cloud is no ordinary cloud. In response to the rumors, the company should build the infrastructure for this potentially greener infrastructure than Google, and innovate with cloud desktop appliances and a cloud-native database and proprietary server fabric primarily based on Kubernetes.
The effort is amazing and helps it stand out from the different clouds that have developed different specialties.
Alibaba Cloud also originated in China. As such, it is the subject of legal guidelines that theoretically enable Beijing to demand detailed information about its prospects and infrastructure management to ensure national security.
Governments outside China have repeatedly seen the opportunity as a rare danger to customers. For example, the United States has taken a “lightning out of the blue” stance under the Trump administration. The Biden administration continued this coverage with the goal of “stopping the storage and processing of our company’s most sensitive private knowledge of U.S. residents and our company’s most valuable spiritual property on cloud-based programs, and the COVID-19 vaccine analysis by Untrustworthy suppliers such as Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom and Tencent are built or operated.”
This is not a language to encourage potential customers to buy from Alibaba Cloud!
This brings us to the billions Alibaba Cloud will spend on its “ecosystem improvements”. It is unclear if this is just new cash, and if it should be transferred to services and referral agencies in metropolitan Malaysia, Portugal and Mexico.
Still, a lot of things should be peer-facing — a community that is sometimes drawn to tech vendors who can both capture mass-market curiosity and tackle lucrative niches. While Alibaba Cloud may be very solid in China and doing well in Southeast Asia, there are few signs of huge buyer enthusiasm in Europe or the US.
Maybe a billion dollars can change that. However, it could be the ongoing trade tensions between China and the rest of the world. ®
Alibaba Cloud unveils multi-billion dollar ‘ecosystem improvement’ • The Register