Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun ( zh, p=Ālǐyún, s=阿里云, l=Ali Cloud), is a

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

company, a subsidiary of

Alibaba Group Alibaba Group Holding Limited, branded as Alibaba (), is a Chinese Multinational corporation, multinational technology company specializing in E-commerce in China, e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. Founded on 28 June 1999 in Hangzho ...

. Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing services to online businesses and Alibaba's own

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

ecosystem. Its international operations are registered and headquartered in

Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...

. Alibaba Cloud offers cloud services that are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, and include elastic compute,

data storage Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are con ...

relational database A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

s, big-data processing, DDoS protection and

content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

s (CDN). It is the largest cloud computing company in China, and in Asia Pacific according to

Gartner Gartner, Inc. is an American research and advisory firm focusing on business and technology topics. Gartner provides its products and services through research reports, conferences, and consulting. Its clients include large corporations, gover ...

. Alibaba Cloud operates data centers in 29 regions and 87 availability zones around the globe. As of June 2017, Alibaba Cloud is placed in the Visionaries' quadrant of

Magic Quadrant Magic Quadrant (MQ) is a series of market research reports published by research and advisory firm Gartner that rely on proprietary qualitative data analysis methods to demonstrate market trends, such as direction, maturity and participants. Thei ...

for cloud

infrastructure as a service Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model where a cloud services vendor provides computing resources such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization (which emulates computer hardware). This service frees users fr ...

, worldwide.

History

Alibaba Cloud was founded in September 2009, and R&D centers and operation centers were opened in

Hangzhou Hangzhou, , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ; formerly romanized as Hangchow is a sub-provincial city in East China and the capital of Zhejiang province. With a population of 13 million, the municipality comprises ten districts, two counti ...

Beijing Beijing, Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Peking, is the capital city of China. With more than 22 million residents, it is the world's List of national capitals by population, most populous national capital city as well as ...

, and

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

2010–2013

In November 2010, the company supported the first Single's Day (11.11) Taobao shopping festival, with 2.4 billion PageViews ( PV) in 24 hours. Two years later, in November 2012, it became the first Chinese cloud service provider to pass ISO27001:2005 (Information Security Management System). In January 2013, Alibaba Cloud merged with HiChina (founded by

Xiangning Zhang Xiangning "Forrest" Zhang 张向宁 (born in 1972) is a Chinese information technology entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture capitalist. He is among the first generation of internet entrepreneurs in China. Zhang is the founder, former chairma ...

) for the www.net.cn business as one of the largest acquisitions in the company's history at the time. In August of that year, ApsaraDB architecture supported 5000 physical machines in a single cluster.

2014–2017

The company's

Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...

data center went online in May 2014, and in December of that year, Alibaba Cloud defended a 14-hour-long

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

attack, peaking at 453.8 Gbit/s. In July 2015, the Alibaba Group invested US$1 billion in Alibaba Cloud. A month later, Alibaba Cloud's first

data center opened, and Singapore was announced as Alibaba Cloud's overseas headquarters. Two US data centers went online in October 2015, and that same month MaxCompute took the lead in the Sort Benchmark, sorting 100 TB data in 377s compared with

Apache Spark Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of Californ ...

's previous record of 1406s. The Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference was also held in October 2015 in

and attracted over 20,000 developers. A month later, in November, the company supported the 11.11 shopping festival with a record of $14.2 billion transactions in 24 hours. Alibaba Cloud partnered with

SK Holdings SK Inc. () is the holding company of South Korea's SK Group and is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. The company is divided into Investment Division and Business Division. The Investment Division operates as a holding company engaged in petrol ...

C&C in April 2016 to provide cloud services to Korean and Chinese companies. A month later, the company formalized a joint venture with

SoftBank is a Japanese multinational Investment company, investment holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, that focuses on investment management. The group primarily invests in companies operating in technology that offer goods and services ...

to launch cloud services in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

that utilize technologies and solutions from Alibaba Cloud. In June 2016, Alibaba Cloud expanded its data center operations in Singapore with the establishment of a second availability zone. Alibaba Cloud also achieved two new certifications overseas: Singapore Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) standard Level 3, and the Payment Card Industry Three-Domain Secure ( PCI 3DS). The company partnered with

Vodafone Germany Vodafone GmbH is a telecommunications operator in Germany owned by Vodafone Group Plc and headquartered in Düsseldorf. It provides mobile phone, LTE, 5G, cable internet, landlines, cable TV, and IPTV services. As of the third quarter of 2021 ...

in November 2016 for Data Center operations and to provide cloud services to

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

and

European European, or Europeans, may refer to: In general * ''European'', an adjective referring to something of, from, or related to Europe ** Ethnic groups in Europe ** Demographics of Europe ** European cuisine, the cuisines of Europe and other West ...

companies. Alibaba became the official cloud services provider of the

Olympics The modern Olympic Games (Olympics; ) are the world's preeminent international sporting events. They feature summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a variety of competit ...

in January 2017. A month later, in February, the company became a founding Member of the EU Cloud Code of Conduct. In June 2017, Alibaba Cloud was placed in the Visionaries quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide. Alibaba Cloud partnered with Malaysia's Fusionex in September 2017 to provide cloud solutions in

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...

, and the

Malaysia Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. Featuring the Tanjung Piai, southernmost point of continental Eurasia, it is a federation, federal constitutional monarchy consisting of States and federal territories of Malaysia, 13 states and thre ...

data center commenced operations in October. That same month, the company partnered with Elastic and launched a new service called Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch. Alibaba Cloud

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

data center commenced operations in December 2017. In addition, Alibaba Cloud received the C5 standard certification from the

German Federal Office for Information Security The Federal Office for Information Security (, abbreviated as BSI) is the German upper-level federal agency in charge of managing computer and communication security for the German government. Its areas of expertise and responsibility include ...

(BSI) for its data centers in Germany and Singapore.

2018–2021

In February 2018, Alibaba Cloud's

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

data center commenced operations. The company's first data center opening in the

Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...

in June 2021. Alibaba Cloud unveiled the ARM-based Yitian 710 chip, designed in-house, for use in its data centers in October 2021. On November 24, 2021, the bug

Log4Shell Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) is a zero-day vulnerability reported in November 2021 in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, involving arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability had existed unnoticed since 2013 and was privately disclosed t ...

was disclosed to Apache by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud's Security Team. On December 22, 2021, the Chinese

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is the sixth-ranked executive department of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. It is responsible for regulation and development of the postal service, Internet, wireles ...

suspended a partnership with Alibaba Cloud for "failure in reporting cybersecurity vulnerabilities" related to the

bug.

2022

In September 2022, Alibaba Cloud announced a $1 billion pledge to upgrade its global partner ecosystem.

Data center regions

Alibaba Cloud has 25 regional data centres globally. The Data Center in

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

is operated by

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public Limited Company () is a British Multinational company, multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates Service (economic ...

Germany (Frankfurt) and certified with C5.

Products

Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing

IaaS Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model where a cloud services vendor provides computing resources such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization (which emulates computer hardware). This service frees users fro ...

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, w ...

DBaaS A cloud database is a database that typically runs on a cloud computing platform and access to the database is provided as-a-service. There are two common deployment models: users can run databases on the cloud independently, using a virtual machin ...

and

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike oth ...

, including services such as

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

Database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

, IoT,

Object storage Object storage (also known as object-based storage or blob storage) is a computer data storage approach that manages data as "blobs" or "objects", as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems, which manage data as a file hierarchy, ...

(OSS),

Kubernetes Kubernetes (), also known as K8s is an open-source software, open-source OS-level virtualization, container orchestration (computing), orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Googl ...

and data customization which can be managed from Alibaba web page or using aliyun command line tool. AnalyticDB was first released in May 2018, and the latest version 3.0 was released in 2019. On April 26, 2019, TPC published TPC-DS benchmark result of AnalyticDB. In 2019, a paper about the system design of AnalyticDB was published in

VLDB conference International Conference on Very Large Data Bases or VLDB conference is an annual conference held by the non-profit ''Very Large Data Base Endowment Inc.'' While named after very large databases, the conference covers the research and development ...

2019.

Academic partners

List of academic alliances: *

Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) is a public university in Shanghai, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 98 ...

* Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) *

University of Malaya The Universiti Malaya (lit 'University of Malaya'; abbreviated UM) is a public university, public research university located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It is the oldest Malaysian institution of higher education, and was the only university in ...

Hong Kong Shue Yan University Hong Kong Shue Yan University (HKSYU or SYU) is a private liberal arts university on North Point, Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong. Founded in 1971 as Hong Kong Shue Yan College () by Henry Hu and Chung Chi-yung, it was unilaterally recognised as ...

* Macao University of Science and Technology *

Singapore University of Social Sciences The Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) is a public autonomous university in Singapore. Established in 2017, SUSS focuses on applied degree programmes primarily in the social sciences. In 2017, SUSS received its inaugural class of ...

(SUSS) *

Télécom Paris Télécom Paris (also known as ENST or Télécom or École nationale supérieure des télécommunications ; also Télécom ParisTech until 2019) is a French public institution for higher education (''grande école'') and engineering research. Loc ...

* SUPINFO International University * Université de technologie sino-européenne de l'université de Shanghai *

Gadjah Mada University Gadjah Mada University (; , abbreviated as UGM) is a public research university located in Sleman, Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Officially founded on 19 December 1949, Gadjah Mada University is one of the oldest and largest institut ...

* Universitas Prasetiya Mulya *

Bina Nusantara University Bina Nusantara University, also known as BINUS UNIVERSITY, is a private university in Indonesia. The main campus of the university is located in Kebon Jeruk, West Jakarta. Most of its campuses are located within the area of Jabodetabek, Greater J ...

Krida Wacana Christian University The Krida Wacana Christian University (), abbreviated as UKRIDA, is a private university in Jakarta, Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and ...

Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education The Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (IVE) is one of the member institutions of the Vocational Training Council (VTC) offering vocational education to post-secondary students in Hong Kong through its nine campi located across the ter ...

Nanyang Polytechnic Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP), established in 1992, is a post-secondary education institution and statutory board under the purview of the Ministry of Education in Singapore. Recognition Nanyang Polytechnic has won many awards and recognit ...

Republic Polytechnic Republic Polytechnic (RP) is a post-secondary education institution and statutory board under the purview of the Ministry of Education in Singapore. Established in 2002, RP is renowned for its sports science programs. It is also the first and ...

* Sekolah Tinggi Teknologi Informasi NIIT * Usman Institute of Technology *AISSMS Institute of Information Technology

References

External links

* {{Authority control

Cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

Chinese companies established in 2009 Companies based in Hangzhou Cloud computing providers Cloud computing Cloud infrastructure Cloud platforms Cloud storage Internet properties established in 2010 Web hosting