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Community Blog Alibaba Cloud Ranked as Strong Performer in Forrester Wave DaaS Q2 2019

Alibaba Cloud Ranked as Strong Performer in Forrester Wave DaaS Q2 2019

In this article, we explore some of the reasons why Alibaba Cloud was recognized a "Strong Performer" in The Forrester Wave: Database-As-A-Service, Q2 2019.

An enterprise IT system has three essential components: database, operating system, and middleware, which are commonly called the three core components of the system software. In addition, they are the core platforms that Internet applications and enterprise information management systems use to store and manage data.

Recently, the famous research firm Forrester published its latest database evaluation report, "The Forrester Wave™ : Database-As-A-Service, Q2 2019". Alibaba Cloud databases were included in this report and won "Strong Performance", the highest rating that any Chinese Internet company has ever received.

The report says that the Alibaba Cloud databases are excellent in technical architecture, developer friendliness, data security, services, ecosystem, and other aspects. They received high scores in the following seven dimensions: disaster recovery, product form, application scenario, development language support, security audit, technical support, after-sales service, and partnership.

Alibaba Cloud has rich database services, provides features such as automatic configuration, management, and high availability and has received customers' recognition in performance, elasticity, configuration, support, and other aspects. In 2018, the Alibaba Cloud databases were included in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. This was the first time that a Chinese company had been included in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. This time its inclusion in Forrester's global database report means that Alibaba Cloud has been recognized by two top-level research companies.

In this article, we will explore why Alibaba Cloud is one of the leading enterprises in the database field.

Features of Alibaba Cloud Database Services

Mature Technical Architecture and Use Cases

  • Disaster Recovery: The database is globally deployed and highly available clusters across AZs are provided in each region.
  • Product Form: Its product forms include transaction processing, online analysis, hybrid transaction and analysis load, and search engine, meeting a variety of user requirements.
  • Application Scenario: Many large customers are using this database. Lots of well-known enterprises have used the Alibaba Cloud databases to support different aspects of their critical businesses.

Robust Developer support

  • Development Language Support: This database provides rich APIs/SDKs and supports more than 13 different development languages and rich ANSI SQL standards.
  • Convenient Management: At the same time, online cloud-native database management tools are provided to implement one-stop data management.

Data Security

  • Security Audit: It provides a comprehensive set of SQL operation audits and a complete graphical query interface to help users check SQL business operation vulnerabilities.

Service and Ecosystem

  • Technical Support and After-Sales Service: Alibaba Cloud provides 24/7 service support. Alibaba Cloud has received good reviews from users and is a reliable database service provider.
  • Partnership: Alibaba Cloud has established good cooperation with many global companies including SAP, VMWare, Vodafone, MariaDB, and Microsoft. The rich ecosystem upstream and downstream benefits the long-term development of customers' businesses.

Ten Years of Development and Experience

Alibaba has been investing in database R&D for a long time. As early as a decade ago, Alibaba encountered the challenge of handling large data volumes and began to try to replace traditional databases with a distributed database. Alibaba initially put forward the de-IOE concept, which has been widely adopted by many enterprises around the world.

After ten years of application practices and technical iterations, Alibaba Cloud has the most powerful and biggest family of cloud database products/services in China, covering relational databases, non-relational databases, analytic databases, and migration tools. These database products/services can meet different database development requirements and solve the critical problem of migrating enterprises' core business to the cloud.

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Currently, Alibaba Cloud is a leader in many cutting-edge database technology fields and can solve the critical problem of migrating enterprises' core business to the cloud:

  • Cloud-Native Database Technology: With technologies such as I/O path bypassing, innovative consistency protocol, physical replication, PolarDB has implemented advanced cloud-native database capabilities and is 10 times more cost-effective than traditional databases.
  • Intelligent Database Technology: The DBaaS platform has many specific and AI-based automation capabilities, including automatic parameter tuning, automatic memory usage optimization, and automatic fault processing.
  • Database Security Technology: Alibaba Cloud is the first cloud database service provider to support BYOK in China. Alibaba Cloud provides end-to-end encryption from user connection to data transmission to data storage.
  • Analytic Database Technology: AnalyticDB is the fastest real-time analytic database and ranks first in the list of globally recognized benchmark TPC-DS.

PolarDB

Alibaba Cloud PolarDB is the first cloud-native database in China. It features the separation of storage and computing and the combination of software and hardware. PolarDB provides high scalability, ultra-large-scale, high reliability and 2× performance over AWS Aurora.

Many related research achievements have been included in many top-level database meetings around the world. This year, the paper on PolarDB was also included in ACM SIGMOD. The paper describes the self-developed storage engine X-Engine which targets large traffic scenarios. The innovation of this storage engine is that it breaks the limitation of the traditional data schema and adopts the new concept of tiered storage. The engine can store data properly based on data access frequency to implement fast storage and reading.

Earlier, two papers, "TcpRT: Instrument and Diagnostic Analysis System for Service Quality of Cloud Databases at Massive Scale in Real-time" and "PolarFS: An Ultra-low Latency and Failure Resilient Distributed File System for Shared Storage Cloud Database", were published at SIGMOD and VLDB respectively. This year, many other papers were published at top-level database conferences.

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Alibaba Group has widely adopted cloud databases. During the 2018 Tmall Double 11 event, the Alibaba Cloud databases successfully dealt with the 100× traffic increase and supported transactions worth 213.5 billion yuan in total.

Seamless Migration from Traditional Database to the Cloud

With the development of mobile Internet, IoT and rapidly growing data volumes, it is an inevitable trend to move enterprises to the cloud, with 84% of the enterprises participating the survey willing to move to the cloud.

Cloud-native databases naturally have the elasticity of cloud computing. In addition, they have the usability and openness of open-source databases as well as the management and performance advantages of traditional databases. Therefore, cloud-native databases are the best database choice in the cloud era. Before cloud-native databases, database migration had always been the crux of migrating enterprises to the cloud.

PolarDB has initially solved the difficulties in migrating databases to the cloud and helps enterprises easily and quickly migrate offline databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle to the cloud (even in hours in some scenarios).

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This breakthrough is due to two important technologies:

  • The low-latency file system, PolarFS developed by Alibaba Cloud, significantly reduces the latency across networks.
  • The new consensus protocol, ParallelRaft, was developed to improve throughput.

Li Feifei, the head of the Alibaba Cloud data intelligence department, once said that cloud-native databases are superior over traditional databases in terms of cost, flexibility, security, and technical evolution. Traditional databases will be phased out like horse-drawn carriages.

Alibaba Cloud Database Facilitates Enterprise Migration to the Cloud

Based on years of internal practices and technical iterations, Alibaba Cloud databases have stably occupied the largest share of the cloud database market in China. It has provided services for many leading organizations in government services, retail, finance, telecommunication, manufacturing, and logistics. About 400,000 databases have been migrated to Alibaba Cloud.

EMS has connected business data across more than 100,000 branches nationwide with Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for MySQL. In addition to solving performance bottlenecks of traditional solution, it also significantly reduces the IT cost during the annual Double 11 event thanks to its scalability feature.

With Alibaba Cloud RDS for MySQL, Zhongan Insurance has restructured its database architecture and implemented data sharing among multiple departments and subsidiaries. Alibaba Cloud RDS for MySQL also meets the requirements in their high-frequency business development and financial scenarios.

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Intime Department Store has completely replaced its traditional database with Alibaba Cloud PolarDB, which allows the company to save more than 10 million yuan on the database overhead alone and easily handle with traffic peaks during big promo events.

How to Save More with Alibaba Cloud Database Services?

We're now offering a 40% discount for first time purchases of subscription database instances, regardless of the configuration, database engine, and region (excluding Japan and Dubai)! This offer is only applicable for users who have passed the Enterprise Real-name Registration and with an order period of no more than one year. Users who do not qualify for the Enterprise Real-name Registration can still get 30% on the same line of products.

Learn more about this offer at: https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/how-to-save-more-with-alibaba-cloud-database-services_594961

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