8 ways Alibaba Cloud challenges AWS, Azure and GCP

So far, Alibaba's business projects include retail, financial services, logistics, media, and digital branding and marketing. Alibaba Cloud provides strong support for these businesses and is the third largest cloud provider in the world, after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Although Alibaba Cloud offers similar products to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, it does have some surprises in comparison aws vs gcp pricing 2022.

Alibaba Cloud is a relatively new entrant to the international cloud market, eager to take a global lead over Amazon. In April, Alibaba Cloud announced plans to invest $28 billion in infrastructure over the next 36 months, which will be used to build data centers, custom operating systems and products for hardware-accelerated solutions.

Compared to Amazon and Alibaba, Amazon is a reseller that owns the inventory and supply chain and sells directly to customers; while Alibaba is a marketplace that only connects buyers and sellers. The biggest difference between the two is that Alibaba's profit margins are much higher (23.3% compared to Amazon's 4.1% in 2019). This gives Alibaba Cloud more cash to invest in its products.

Below, are six ways Alibaba Cloud beats or rivals other leading cloud providers.

Highest number of services aws vs gcp pricing 2022

Amazon Web Services has 175 services. In the second half of 2019, Alibaba announced 597 new products and 300 solutions. With so many products and solutions, users have more choices, which has an overwhelming advantage in comparison. Alibaba Cloud is aimed at enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, and there is bound to be a solution.

Computational storage

Today, processing massive amounts of data can only be done by optimizing the hardware path the data takes from disk to the application and keeping the computation as close to storage as possible.

In terms of computing storage, when customers use Alibaba Cloud to process massive data, they have low-latency access features. During Singles' Day, for example, Alibaba Cloud's PolarDB database processed $30 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) within 24 hours, jumping by $12 billion in the first hour as shoppers scrambled to Buying an item, causing the merchant to run out of stock. With so many benefits, you can see why Alibaba Cloud is so focused on supporting the database for events, and one of the technologies they use is computational storage.

Computational storage is plentiful and growing rapidly. At the most basic level, PolarDB uses the FPGA to perform transparent compression of the data, whereby the data is decompressed within the data path and the kernel driver does not know the difference. For some of the most common queries, this can reduce query times by up to 50%, with an average reduction of about 30%. This is just a compression pushdown, there is still some performance to extract as other firmwares are developed.

Database Compatibility and Performance aws vs gcp pricing 2022

PolarDB is the primary database product for Alibaba customers with high data throughput use cases. It uses InnoDB as the storage engine, the same as MySQL but heavily modified for use as a cloud-native database. PolarDB is designed with hardware acceleration in mind, and like the aforementioned compute storage, it uses RDMA to connect storage and compute nodes, thereby eliminating I/O bottlenecks.

Alibaba has taken a different tack when it comes to database migration. Instead of offering proprietary databases and migration tools, they make PolarDB compatible with most databases used in commercial environments. There are versions that can run queries from MySQL, PostgreSQL, and a large portion of Oracle databases. By design, you may be able to run your application on PolarDB unchanged. This is much easier than porting application logic.

Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN)

Alibaba Cloud operates its own cross-regional network, which means you can control the latency and bandwidth between parts of your application running in different regions. Other providers use public internet connection zones, which makes you immune to zone congestion.

Alibaba Cloud achieves this through its software-defined networking product, Cloud Enterprise Network, a global network for building distributed business systems and hybrid clouds. CEN is a full mesh network connecting VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and VBR (Virtual Bridge Router). It's basically a zone-to-zone virtual networking solution. This is especially useful for firewalls operating in China, where firewalls typically introduce significant delays. CEN provides latency and bandwidth guarantees and is the same network infrastructure that Alibaba uses for its e-commerce products.

You can increase or decrease bandwidth in real time through the web console or API.

intelligent brain

Although Alibaba won't win any marketing awards for its innovative naming, its "intelligent brain" solves some really big problems, made possible in part by the full-scale business they run, and it shows AI technology What are the benefits when implemented at scale aws vs gcp pricing 2022.

While these technology offerings are available from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, you need a systems integrator to design, build, test, and support the final solution. Alibaba's product is a turnkey solution, or such a large turnkey solution that is available, directly supported by the supplier.

Alibaba Cloud ET Brains is designed to be used as an intelligent platform for solving complex business and social problems. There are talents in smart cities, medicine, manufacturing, aviation, environment and finance. Every brain is a complex solution and worth mentioning.

out of the box

Getting started in the heavily regulated financial services industry requires a significant investment of resources, not only to overcome regulatory challenges, but also to build and operate the IT mechanisms needed to make it work aws vs gcp pricing 2022.

Credit is a good business as long as you model the risk correctly, as there are a lot of "unbanked" people in developing countries. But, given the low profit margins, how can you provide credit and still make a profit? Financial Minds offers a solution.

Here, credit risk modeling is a more or less ready-to-use solution with scorecard templates, a set of commonly used model variables, and workflows available to modelers. Just add your own data, tweak the model, and you can get instant credit.

Bring your own key

Alibaba Cloud recently announced the "Bring Your Own Key" feature to provide end-to-end protection of data at rest. Beyond post-quantum cryptography, data should be secure no matter where it resides in the Alibaba ecosystem.

Tailored

Alibaba Cloud offers an impressive range of products tailored specifically for the Asian market. In many respects, such as price, product breadth and depth, they beat the competition. I think their biggest disadvantage is their lack of sales experience in Western markets. It's all here, but their technical presales, dropshipping, support, and developer outreach/engagement are way behind the likes of AWS, Azure, and GCP. That's why you know so little about them.