What is Alibaba Cloud Services?
Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, is a cloud computing company that is a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group. Founded in September 2009, it is now China’s largest cloud service provider and a leader in cloud and artificial intelligence. Its headquarters are in Hangzhou, and it has operation centers in Hangzhou, Beijing, and Silicon Valley.
Core services offered by Alibaba Cloud “Aliyun” include Cloud Storage Services, which enable the company to provide low-cost, high-reliability, and high-availability storage services for a wide range of storage resources the Internet of Things platform which goes into AliOS, a Linux distribution developed by Alibaba Cloud that was designed for smart cars and other IoT devices, and had been used as a mobile operations system; and, not to mention the big two, AI and machine learning. Alibaba AI and Data Intelligence possess leading cloud infrastructure, data intelligence processing, and algorithms that solve a wide range problems across multiple industries. With about 700k Secure Sockets Layers (SSL), Alibaba Cloud provides secure transactions and load balancing for clients.
Not only that, but Alibaba Cloud, unlike its competitors, has cloud services on a pay-as-you-go basis and includes not just data storage but also relational databases, big data processing, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection all available to users. It’s no wonder Alibaba Cloud operates data centers in about 29 regions and has over 87 availability zones around the world.
ALIBABA CLOUD’S ACHIEVEMENTS AND EXPERTISE.
Since Aliyun was founded, it has built a strong reputation as a trailblazer. Being the number one cloud services provider and holding more than a quarter of the market in China is no small feat by any means.
Another of Alibaba Cloud’s greatest feats is the City Brain. Originally launched in Hangzhou and later expanded to Kuala Lumpur, City Brain uses AI and real-time data from live CCTV and over 300 traffic lights to optimize traffic flows, reducing emergency response times by approximately 50%, according to an article from ITU.
Alibaba Cloud has also partnered with a good number of “big names,” such as SK Holdings C&C in order to provide cloud services to Korean and Chinese companies, and is going ahead to legalize a joint venture with SoftBank, Japan. Alibaba Cloud also partnered with Vodafone Germany, becoming the named cloud services provider for the Olympics in January 2017, and subsequently became a founding member of the EU Cloud Code of Conduct.
After many more impressive feats, in 2022, Aliyun disclosed a one billion dollar pledge to to improve its global partner ecosystem. In furtherance of this, Alibaba Cloud partnered with LVMH, and built “LVMH ATOM.” Alibaba Cloud also partnered with MDEC (Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation) and launched City Brain in Kuala Lumpur. Furthermore, in partnership with NVIDIA, Alibaba Cloud integrated its solution with NVIDIA to enhance mobility experiences for China-based automakers.
WHAT MAKES ALIYUN UNIQUE?
One of the things that sets “Aliyun” apart from other cloud providers is that it seems to have been built with a perfect understanding of Asian markets, but it’s not just that. Aliyun, being one of the most important parts of the Alibaba Group, including platforms like Taobao and Alipay, which are globally recognized as industry giants, gives Alibaba Cloud an edge in today’s world.
Alibaba Cloud also champions open-source AI. It’s Qwen models have been released publicly under Apache 2.0 licenses, and Qwen’s multimodal branches and benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA) underscore technical depth and accessibility to the public.
It shouldn’t go without mentioning that cost-wise, Alibaba Cloud remains competitive, since it’s often 35% cheaper than AWS in Asia-Pacific regions. And With their free tier services and startup grants, Aliyun is a compelling choice for businesses, new and old.