Alibaba Cloud

https://www.alibabacloud.com

by paulmach • 9 years ago

520 352 9 years ago

analyst74• 9 years ago

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?

LeoPanthera• 9 years ago

3 in the US. One in NJ, two in Silicon Valley.

modarts2• 9 years ago

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

rifung2• 9 years ago

How many services do people on AWS usually use?

What else besides EC2 and S3?

tilolebo• 9 years ago

I 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.

edaemon4• 9 years ago

At 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.

iliketosleep3• 9 years ago

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.

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

But won't it provide competition in the cloud space to drive costs down ? Or will no one take it seriously ?

problems4• 9 years ago

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.

MaxfordAndSons4• 9 years 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.

iliketosleep3• 9 years ago

Right. The difference is there's at least some push back from (some) US companies, where they attempt to use secure encryption schemes. Whereas in China, it's taken as a given that all these large enterprises will submit to any kind of government demands without resistance or public debate.

tjpnz• 9 years ago

Which you could argue is true of most businesses given how much stuff is manufactured there.

mitchellh• 9 years ago

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

(Note: I work on Terraform)

nodesocket2• 9 years ago

You are Terraform :-)

jdubs• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

What's wrong with Germany?

eb0la• 9 years ago

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

pluma4• 9 years ago

Frankfurt 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• 9 years ago

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

flyGuyOnTheSly2• 9 years ago

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

gondo2• 9 years 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

singlow• 9 years ago

If 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.

voltagex_• 9 years ago

It also mentions a "Public traffic fee" of 0.13USD/GB - not sure what that's about.

rahimnathwani2• 9 years ago

The server locations are outside Asia ("US West, US East, EU Central and Australia regions"). Any idea whether those servers have good peering with mainland Chinese ISPs?

katasourcing4• 9 years ago

Just for your information, many Chinese firms buy hosts from AWS, linode etc. majorly US located servers, had no issues with that.

Monotoko5• 9 years ago

US West has reasonable peering, under 200ms most of the time and I can run a VPN through it.

Best is HK though, is that region not included?

EZ-E2• 9 years ago

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

JumpCrisscross• 9 years ago

Or 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-E2• 9 years ago

Yes, 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

Monotoko5• 9 years ago

I 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• 9 years ago

Or for example, there is any free text user input that could be subversive...

jonmaim2• 9 years ago

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.

redthrowaway• 9 years ago

And pretty much everything useful is blocked. We rolled out an update that broke our app for all of China, because cloudfront was blocked. That was a new one for me.

Having spent a painfully slow 10 hours in the airport in Beijing let me appreciate just how much of the Internet breaks when you block the biggest sites. Serve up jQuery through googleapis.com? Not in China, you don't. Hope it wasn't doing any heavy lifting for you.

gonyea4• 9 years ago

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.

normanjoyner• 9 years ago

this is definitely a valid concern. decoupling automation from your cloud provider, moving it a layer up the stack, and leveraging only IaaS, can actually be quite helpful in these scenarios. this is an area where having a multicloud strategy, or minimally the ability to move between clouds at will, is essential.

mrep• 9 years ago

yep!

My company will never trust any chinese company with anything especially our data.

visarga• 9 years ago

Only Google and Amazon are safe, they don't show data even to FBI /s

jameslk• 9 years ago

Meanwhile billions of dollars are traded in Alibaba stock through the Cayman Islands on the NYSE. Somehow that hasn't led to much trepidation.

Waterluvian• 9 years ago

I have that concern about AWS and other American hosting, too.

croisillon• 9 years ago

I have a related concerns about customer protection, maybe someone knows about it and can tell me: the famous Chinese bike-sharing companies are now coming everywhere in US & Europe. How "dangerous" (at least privacy-wise) is it to use them (i.e. give them your contact and bank data)?

aembleton• 9 years ago

I signed up a couple of weeks ago to Mobike, and so far it's worked well. I've given them my credit card details, which should provide me with some protection. If I was really paranoid I'd use a prepaid card like my Monzo card.

At some point I'll look at what data it is sending out, and how often. Many people have Chinese apps on their phones as many utilities in the Play store originate there. If you watch where they're communicating to you can see that it is Beijing. Just as most apps talk to various servers in the US.

devopsproject• 9 years ago

They are required by Chinese law to track you: http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/china-cyberspace...

I'd uninstall any chinese made app if you care about privacy

banach• 9 years ago

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

katasourcing4• 9 years ago

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

likelynew• 9 years ago

Why would you do that?

Bakary• 9 years ago

I don't see why not.

plandis3• 9 years ago

Now try hosting a blog that critics the Chinese government.

zbruhnke• 9 years ago

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

pducks324• 9 years ago

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

brianwawok3• 9 years ago

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

uptownhr• 9 years ago

Network busy, please try again later.... https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNoHDmdynXAr9ahtyo2GjAe4iKtzDDC1dEBQbN...

nkkollaw6• 9 years ago

Same here. What is that?

Ylodi• 9 years ago

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

sangd• 9 years ago

Clicking Buy for web hosting leads me to a Chinese website: https://ews.console.aliyun.com/buy.htm?spm=a3c0i.149865.7761...

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

bobbles• 9 years ago

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

madeofpalk• 9 years ago

Do you think it would be more serious if you were Chinese?

pcr0• 9 years ago

Did you try clicking the globe in the header? You can view the page in English.

lstamour• 9 years ago

You can switch languages in the header to view the checkout page in English: https://ews.console.aliyun.com/buy.htm?spm=a3c0i.149865.7761...

gondo2• 9 years ago

"Great Firewall as a service" :)

dis-sys3• 9 years ago

extra protection for free, no NSA access!

tristanj• 9 years ago

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?

krf• 9 years ago

Maybe 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• 9 years ago

30/year is just a promotion. After a year the price is almost 10x higher.

Monotoko5• 9 years ago

They rebranded the international service.

problems4• 9 years ago

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.

mjs• 9 years ago

Datacenter locations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Cloud#Data_Center_Loca...

gtsteve• 9 years ago

To be honest, I'd just never heard of this. I'm excited to hear they've got a Dubai datacenter because every now and again my company is asked about starting an instance of our app over there. I've done lots of searching for UAE based cloud hosting and somehow never came across Alibaba. I was resigned to just leasing some servers if we ever actually had to do this but it's great to know we've got another option.

always_good2• 9 years ago

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

dyu-4• 9 years ago

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_good2• 9 years ago

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

kevinsd• 9 years ago

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...

sadovmychyi• 9 years ago

App 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• 9 years ago

Here's a great blog post on how to use it. https://medium.com/google-cloud/uploading-resizing-and-servi...

KaoruAoiShiho• 9 years ago

How's the pricing compared to https://www.imgix.com/pricing or filepicker.io?

ghayes• 9 years ago

I add my support as Imgix being a great service.

_Codemonkeyism4• 9 years ago

Imgix is unbelievable. The filters are useful, the support is great but above all the prices are excellent.

ENGNR• 9 years ago

It's actually not that bad doing it in the browser these days with something like https://github.com/nodeca/pica

Saves upload time for large images at the very least

OJFord• 9 years ago

Until we get solid middle-out compression, surely the main problem with doing it in the browser was, is, and will continue to be bandwidth?

dandr01d• 9 years ago

You could create a Lambda function to create and upload these transforms back to S3/CloudFront. Would definitely be a nice feature to get out of the box though.

kvz2• 9 years ago

Or just use transloadit.com which has been providing that, and other processing features since 2009 :)

Disclosure: Transloadit founder

ToFab123• 9 years ago

Why do you not have code samples in c#?

zxstreak• 9 years ago

Our website and app are heavily replying on the image servers. https://www.ywart.com

giaour• 9 years ago

There's no AWS service that does this, but you can set something up using Lambda, API Gateway, and S3. There's an example repo at https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-resizing

baybal23• 9 years ago

It will be different: Aliyun gives you transcoding/resizing on every CDN endpoint (which they have many) vs resizing in DC

forgot-my-pw2• 9 years ago

Alternatively, you can use a 3rd party image engine on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045...

It should be a lot faster.

wener• 9 years ago

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.

sschueller• 9 years ago

How is this limited to China?

2pointsomone• 9 years ago

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.

liuw• 9 years ago

even my company will sale or buy some personal data, we will gather as much data as we can.

What does this even mean? What is the subtext here? Because your company (which one?) is regarded as high status (higher than Alibaba?) / serious about data protection (but then you say it sells personal data?) ?

The practice of your company has no bearing of the practice of Alibaba. Alibaba could be better, Alibaba could also be worse.

Disclosure: I'm a Chinese working oversea and am genuinely interested in reacquaint myself with the business practice in China.

est• 9 years ago

You are just racist.

4684499• 9 years ago

Hmm. If it's something you despise, then why do you still work for them?

porker• 9 years ago

There's always http://cloudinary.com/

nkkollaw6• 9 years ago

Does it work for GIFs?

I've just launched https://www.gifsonic.com for resizing animated GIFs, and I'm still trying to figure out how useful it is...

jhgg• 9 years ago

Gif resizing is pretty hard. We've spent some pretty substantial effort in doing gif resizes for our infra.

Out of curiosity, what library is your saas backed by?

dpix• 9 years ago

I wrote a blog post about how to set this up on an Elastic Beanstalk instance. As well as uploading images directly to S3 rather than double handling them on your own backend. https://pickledsoftware.co.nz/jekyll/update/2017/02/14/Hosti...

wanghq7• 9 years ago

Glad that you find it useful. I'd like to point out that lambda+s3 notification solution is asynchronous, while this OSS feature does transformation synchronously and can be applied to any objects (not just the new ones which could trigger functions), which is pretty awesome.

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).

GordonS• 9 years ago

Do you guys take on remote workers ?

jychang• 9 years ago

I currently live in Bellevue, not looking for a job right now but where is the Alibaba Cloud office? Downtown? Factoria near T-Mobile? Crossroads near MS campus?

plandis3• 9 years ago

So not in Seattle.

sudhirj3• 9 years ago

For an AWS equivalent, can deploy https://github.com/RealImage/concave on Lambda+API Gateway in the same region as the source images s3 bucket, and stick a Cloudfront distribution in front of it. Hit me up at sudhir.j@gmail.com if you need help.

sudhirj3• 9 years ago

Used in production at http://www.moviebuff.com and https://www.justickets.in if you want to see it in action.

grillwork• 9 years ago

i use cloudinary for these same type of features over AWS. Their libraries and UX isn't always the best but their transformation features are out of this world good.

neya• 9 years ago

I use a (not so well known) feature with Google AppEngine - Images API. It's pretty awesome as well. Works really well for web applications with basic image manipulation requirements.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/imag...

The best part is, you call your image with specific parameters that'll do transformations on the fly. For example,

    <image url>/image.jpg?s=120

will return a 120px image. Appending -c will give you a cropped version, etc.

amrit_b• 9 years ago

Reminds me of something similar I did with videos couple of years back - http://www.transcode.io/

agopaul• 9 years ago

There are other Saas services for that, like https://www.imgix.com/. Not sure if this plays well with S3 out of the box though

asadjb• 9 years ago

I am using Imgix for a personal photography site and it works great with S3. You point it to an S3 bucket, give it the access keys, and then use the URL they provide instead of the S3 bucket URL.

Using various query params, you can then control a bunch of transformations to the images that are applied on the fly when requested.

nicozhangw• 9 years ago

Another company named qiniu offers this feature

baybal23• 9 years ago

Not only they provide real-time resizing on CDN, but many many many other things: hardware HTTPS acceleration (check their HTTP vs HTTPS latency,) per-file authentication, hardware Gzip, 'bouncer' for websocket connections. They used to provide free load balancing on the edge for APIs, but I can't find that service in the control panel anymore.

jijajoltz• 9 years ago

try this: http://pageload.io - proxy that goes between your origin and cdn or users and optimizes content for you. per host pricing.

forgot-my-pw2• 9 years ago

You can use this on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045...

It's really fast and can do image resize on the fly. They wrote the engine in C and Assembly. Should be way faster than ImageMagick.

smcnally• 9 years ago

Automattic's Photon does this, too. https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/photon/api/

dyu-4• 9 years ago

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

m3adow• 9 years ago

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

dyu-4• 9 years ago

Err. No free 1 year plan. Its just a website builder's plan that is free.

nodesocket2• 9 years ago

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

rifung2• 9 years ago

I believe that if you host it in Taiwan it would still have to go through the Chinese firewall if it were accessed in China.

xir782• 9 years ago

Yeah that’s a different firewall :)

wyred• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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?

Monotoko5• 9 years ago

The 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.

dis-sys3• 9 years ago

what actually made you to believe that GCE is accessible in China? are you assuming GFW is a fantasy?

edaemon4• 9 years ago

At my work we tested various services for providing content to our users in China and we found that the most important factor was whether or not the content was hosted inside mainland China. If it has to traverse the Great Firewall it will be slow; if the source is within the border it at least has a chance at acceptable performance.

gentro5• 9 years ago

Don't forget there's also:

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

xir782• 9 years ago

Can you add ssl certs to Tcloud now? That used to be a pita.

gentro5• 9 years ago

They 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.

bluepeter2• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

Have you looked at Alipay[1]?

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

gentro5• 9 years ago

My service is not subscription oriented, but I take Alipay and WeChat pay, which together probably account for >80% of potential customers. But you need a registered Chinese business entity.

wyldfire• 9 years ago

I'd be super concerned about using Baidu and Netease. If the marketing materials aren't translated into English, then it's a near certainty that support for English speaking customers will be subpar.

That said, I'm curious about demand/non-SaaS-oriented use of these computing platforms.

edaemon4• 9 years ago

Alibaba Cloud doesn't have full support for English-speaking customers either. The billing interface is only in Chinese, and some of the core features are only available on their Chinese site (there are two separate logins with a nearly identical UI). There are also some issues that require a Chinese national with a verified identity to take care of.

You can get by with most things but I've found that you really need someone who can read Chinese to use it properly.

strin• 9 years ago

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

atemerev• 9 years ago

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.

nkkollaw6• 9 years ago

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

xiconfjs• 9 years ago

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

Sounds strange to me.

brianwawok3• 9 years ago

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.

dis-sys3• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

What is GFW?

lorenzhs2• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall

david90• 9 years ago

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.

smueller1234• 9 years ago

Indeed, 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.

baybal23• 9 years ago

So 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• 9 years ago

As 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• 9 years ago

Shhhhh! You'll upset the brilliant Ivy League economists talking about how great free trade is.

cmahler7• 9 years ago

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.

wheaties• 9 years ago

Yes, 1 billion people.

friedman23• 9 years ago

We need globalization for the larger markets and the exchange of goods from other countries that have a comparative advantage. China has one of the largest markets within its own borders so it can afford to be protectionist. (this will quickly change)

thablackbull• 9 years ago

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...

dnadler• 9 years ago

IMO this is because China is still a (massive) developing economy with large swaths of undeveloped resources and untapped labor.

dilemma• 9 years ago

The US has never had or been a free market. "Free trade" is propaganda used to forcefully open foreign markets to US businesses looking for further growth.

cma• 9 years ago

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003Z9L4NA/

mercurysmessage• 9 years ago

I don't think your comment is sincere. Looks like you've already made up your mind.

jtraffic• 9 years ago

I could ask the reverse: "why isn't China more successful?"

It's such a complicated issue that you could argue almost anything. I think any discussion must acknowledge Hong Kong, however, as an important data point.

My opinion is that the Communist party, even despite its "GDP obsession" [1], has gotten in the way more than anything.

As an (admittedly, very rough) estimate, if you take Hong Kong's GDP per person and multiply it by China's population, you get $58 trillion.

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/china/21689628-chinas-obsessi...

gentro5• 9 years ago

The argument for trade hinges on competitive advantage. Each country should produce what it is most efficient at producing based on its resources.

In this way China has indeed rode the wave of globalization because its bountiful cheap labor made it suited to manufacturing small goods for richer economies.

The capital accumulated through these activities were reinvested so that Chinese companies could move into more value added industries like electronics, automobiles, aerospace, and services, which is possible because China has a deep well of human capital (i.e. people) who have a strong work ethic and are eager to learn new skills.

Moreover, because China has both a gigantic internal market and vast human resources, it's possible that Chinese suppliers can have a competitive advantage in virtually every industry, making the benefits of external trade less obvious. (This was China's attitude towards Europeans during colonial times too - that trade was unnecessary because they had nothing of value to China).

Or if Chinese suppliers currently don't have a competitive advantage in terms of price or quality, the government can use protectionist policies to shield those industries until they do have an advantage.

You might say that China has played all the right cards in the game of globalization. Donald Trump had been saying it for a long time.

scotchmi_st• 9 years ago

China's GDP per capita is still somewhere between #70 and #80 in the world[1]. It just happens to be a big country with lots of people.

If the US or most other western countries had same number of people is China, they would be doing much better. Also to go out on a limb a bit, you could probably draw a graph which shows a correlation between China relaxing its protectionism and its GDP increasing at a faster rate as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

nine_k2• 9 years ago

Two major factors of China's apparent success are cheap labor and creative reporting.

The country's problems, aka the price paid for the industrial success, are a bit less prominently seen. Western countries faced the same problems (pollution, bad work conditions, etc) at the time of their first industrial revolutions, but by now are totally unwilling to pay such a price any more.

elevensies• 9 years ago

I believe China's strategy is to allow foreign business to operate to a certain extent to provide a competitive impetus to their local favored companies. Basically I think their strategy is, inside China the foreign company will be allowed to have a market share of 20% to 50%, if it exceeds that they will create obstacles, as their own preferred (i.e. Chinese controlled) companies figure out how to compete.

Once it is competitive they will subsidize it (via. redistribution from financial repression of lower & middle class individuals to below market financing of businesses, and compliant regulation i.e. no unions, lax pollution) to give it an advantage to gain market share globally.

Regarding immigration, they already have a huge labor supply and if they need more I think they will prefer to do it by exporting their political and managerial apparatus, rather than importing bodies. For example their investments in Africa, and Australia: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/world/australia/china-pol... .

ehsankia• 9 years ago

I'm curious, I'm a bit ignorant but what kind of novel things has china produced?

Has there ever been a huge advance in either software or hardware where the western world copied China? A brand new amazing programming language, a world changing battery technology, a cure for a big disease, etc?

I've seen a few interesting CS papers, but I don't keep up to much. As far as I can tell, all the biggest advancements are being done by companies here.

China is quite impressive in how they keep up in their own little bubble with their 1B people, but it's one thing to reimplement Google/Youtube, it's another thing to create new world changing technologies.

awkwarddaturtle7• 9 years ago

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

That's because we went through a neoliberal shift after ww2. Prior to ww2, we were leaders of protectionism.

"According to Paul Bairoch, since the end of the 18th century, the United States has been "the homeland and bastion of modern protectionism". In fact, the United States never adhered to free trade until 1945."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...

We needed protectionism in order to protect our much younger companies/industries so that they can develop and grow and compete against more established british/european companies.

yet china almost completely locks out foreign businesses and takes next to no immigrants and is obviously a quickly growing global superpower.

They need protectionism in order for their own companies or industries to develop. Otherwise, western corporations would just flood in and own the chinese market.

The problem is when chinese industries mature and their own markets get saturated, they are going to be in the same situation as the US/West. They are going to want to open up markets a round the world to sell their goods to and invest their excess capital.

ethbro6• 9 years ago

Gee, I wonder why a country with notoriously tight control of information would help funnel business to a single domestic cloud infrastructure provider...

edaemon4• 9 years ago

It's worth noting that, no matter where you go, the ICP licensing process is political.

We've had trouble with ours and essentially nobody has answers. The requirements can change without warning and no companies inside or outside of China have a surefire way to get, keep, and use an ICP license.

jakozaur• 9 years ago

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.

MikeDoesCode• 9 years ago

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.

wanghq7• 9 years ago

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...

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• 9 years ago

You could have linked directly to the source.

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

wanghq7• 9 years ago

Thanks. Somehow my search didn't find this.

plandis3• 9 years ago

Bellevue 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+)

wanghq7• 9 years ago

Thanks for the clarification. I wanted to use Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area) so I don't need to explain where Bellevue is.

allan_s• 9 years ago

After reading this comparison between AWS S3 apis and Aliyun OSS apis 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• 9 years ago

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

davidgerard• 9 years ago

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.

bArray• 9 years ago

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

crispytx• 9 years ago

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

lucaspottersky• 9 years ago

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

liuxiaobo• 9 years ago

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

michael-go• 9 years ago

The OLAP "Analytics DB" looks interesting https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/analytic-db

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

JohnTHaller4• 9 years ago

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.

dfguo• 9 years ago

Since then, Baidu has been serving most of their assets through https to prevent hijacking.

CobrastanJorji• 9 years ago

How confident are you that the Chinese government does not have the SSL keys for Baidu? Because I am 0% confident.

apetresc• 9 years ago

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?

JohnTHaller4• 9 years ago

Very true. Heck, China could also modify images to take advantage of vulnerable libraries.

computerex• 9 years ago

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

willstrafach• 9 years ago

Worth pointing out that it was not GFW which performed the man-in-the-middle, it was a separate system: https://citizenlab.ca/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/

IshKebab• 9 years ago

It's https.

Cthulhu_• 9 years ago

This is why there needs to be a system where hashes for JS files can be securely installed in browsers for verification.

victor871129• 9 years ago

It exists, is called SSL

mikegerwitz• 9 years ago

I want to see native support for content-level cryptographic signatures in browsers. I also want it to be able to use a local GPG keyring, so I can validate against my chosen web of trust. JavaScript programs are just that---programs. When I use my package manager, or when I download a package online, I have a signature to verify against---either automatically (former) or manually (latter); https does not solve that.

This is different than the CA system, which verifies the _server_, not the content being served. A compromised server or successful MitM allows an attacker to modify data undetected.

This is also different from subresource integrity---it's a step in the right direction, but that only helps with third-party resources being loaded, and it doesn't at all help with cryptographic signatures.

Having signatures also helps with the case of programs constantly being updated outside the users' control. JavaScript programs are almost always ephemeral---they load with a webpage, and disappear when you leave, barring certain caching. "Updates" aren't really updates---you are re-downloading the program every time. So, hashes will change, and without cryptographic signatures, you can't be sure whether the new hash should even be trusted.

As a separate benefit, this support would also be useful for authentication online and asserting one's identity on e.g. social media, especially decentralized/federated services.

cakeface• 9 years ago

I feel like this is just another reason to use subresource integrity on your includes. If you are only pulling javascript and your HTML is served outside of China you can ensure the correctness of the response.

taf2• 9 years ago

Doesn't the resource still need to be requested to perform the integrity check? If I recall correctly the script was being redirected to a github gist which is why it was effectively a DDOS on github... so yes sub-resource integrity is great but wouldn't protect against this type of attack since the requester was the target of the attack but rather the source...

wickedlogic• 9 years ago

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"

djsumdog• 9 years ago

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.

Punisher• 9 years ago

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

gobengo• 9 years ago

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

wanghq7• 9 years ago

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

Cub3• 9 years ago

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

du_bing• 9 years ago

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.

Alibaba Cloud

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