AWS and Alibaba Cloud Comparative Study 1 - Origin of AWS & AWS and Alibaba Cloud Comparative Study 2 - Alibaba Cloud

A Comparative Study of Alibaba Cloud and AWS 1: The Origin of AWS
​ AWS, the earliest and largest cloud computing service provider in the world, has always been the industry benchmark and the benchmarking target of all first-tier cloud computing vendors. Although it has been strongly challenged by Microsoft Azure in business in recent years, it is still expected to maintain its No. 1 position in the world in recent years. As the largest cloud service provider in China, Alibaba Cloud leads the country and even the entire Asia-Pacific region in terms of scale and business cooperation. In recent years, the Chinese market has been challenged by both policy and competitors. However, the revenue still more than doubled the gap between the second and third places (Cloud and Tencent Cloud) aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

Cloud computing initially provided an enterprise's computing and storage capabilities to third parties through interfaces or tools, thereby charging service fees. If Apple created the era of the mobile Internet, then Amazon opened the era of cloud computing services, completely changing the way companies purchase and use IT services. Before I start to introduce the various services of cloud computing, as well as the benchmark products of Alibaba Cloud, the first domestic brother and the global leader Amazon, I think it is necessary to review how the cloud computing industry originated. Through the origin story, we can better understand the initial considerations of this business and the impact on the direction of the industry aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

In a conversation with AWS CEO Andy Jassy, ​​looking back, none of them expected AWS to grow so fast. This should all go back to the early 2000s. At that time, Amazon, as an online e-commerce site mainly focusing on online books, encountered a bottleneck in system expansion. At that time, Amazon hoped to add some new functions and applications to serve long-tail customers, but at that time it was very constrained due to problems with its software and system architecture. At that time, Amazon still adopted a layered (application layer, data layer and presentation layer) and a monolithic system program architecture. In the background, a data set system composed of a relational database is used. So CTO Werner Vogels decided to rewrite most of the code aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

So Amazon began to refactor its system to divide the data into the three largest data sets. It is divided into users, commodities and orders, and these three parts are divided into smaller business units. At the same time, during this period, Amazon will also provide IT infrastructure and online application services for other cooperative companies, so that these merchants can sell their own products on the Amazon website without building their own IT systems. Such a cooperative system has created a need to transform these IT services into a pay-as-you-go model that can be provided to customers. Initially includes storage, servers, and networking aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

Around 2000, Amazon has quietly started to provide customers with basic IT services. These services initially appeared to be very similar to the plethora of web hosting providers at the time, though Amazon offered a lot of hosting services for its e-commerce. In 2000, Amazon had prepared the technology and resources for launching a real cloud service system later. At that time, Amazon invested billions of dollars in the procurement of infrastructure resources and the development of systems in order to respond to the rapidly growing storage and computing power needs of itself and its customers. By 2004, AWS was finally announced and officially launched in 2006. There are only two earliest AWS services, one is S3 storage, and the other is Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) elastic computing service. In 2005, just a year after the official announcement, AWS had a turnover of nearly $8 billion.

​ Amazon’s original intention in launching its cloud computing business is actually to serve merchants who sell products on Amazon, but its infrastructure provision capabilities can actually be extended to the entire IT infrastructure leasing and service field. In the early and mid 2000s, with the end of the Internet bubble, a new round of information technology investment development boom. Amazon's service and resource preparation just caught up with the outbreak of a large number of user needs, so it successfully ate the cloud computing dividend and became the world's number one cloud computing service provider. This should be the result of a combination of preparation and opportunity aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

AWS and Alibaba Cloud Comparative Study 2 - Alibaba Cloud
Compared with AWS, Alibaba Cloud was born much later. At the time, Amazon's AWS was already very successful in the US. Alibaba first put forward the slogan of going to IOE in 2008, and the starting point of Alibaba Cloud was also in October of that year. At that time, both Alibaba and other domestic Internet companies were extremely dependent on IBM's minicomputers, EMC's storage and Oracle's databases. These minicomputers, storage devices and commercial databases are expensive, but the number of Internet users is exploding. During peak hours, network services often stop responding. Of course, this is not a problem with Alibaba. All major domestic Internet companies are trying to solve the problem of low-cost computing power expansion.

This problem is often solved by Internet companies in Silicon Valley at the start-up stage. Among them, Amazon is the first to open its own basic computing services and storage services to third parties in the form of cloud computing. This proves that Amazon has taken the lead in solving the problem of low-cost expansion of computing and storage in its development process. In the early days of Google, in order to save costs for the search engine server cluster, the cluster was built with ordinary PC hardware from the beginning. Therefore, they must rely on system redundancy and innovations in software to address reliability and availability issues. From 1999 to 2000, Google's early team copied a total of about 30 Corkboard servers like the one below. Google's cloud service was launched about 3 months after AWS.

How to assemble these common and cheap commercial hardware together and flexibly call computing power and storage is a problem that must be solved. The so-called cloud computing technology is actually developed by these Silicon Valley startups in the process of solving the horizontal expansion of the storage and computing power of computer clusters built by cheap ordinary hardware devices.

Of course, due to poor information, domestic Internet companies have experienced a history of being "fooled" by IOEs. They sold a large number of expensive enterprise-level software and hardware to domestic Internet companies in the form of packages or all-in-one computers. These software and hardware are expensive and complex to scale. Of course, Ali was the first to react, so Ali became the first company to launch cloud service business and became the industry leader. It is said that Ma Yun and Wang Jian, who was still in Microsoft Research Asia, made up their minds to engage in IOE and cloud computing in a chat. Later, after various doubts and pressures within Ali in 2009, the Feitian system was finally launched in early 2010. Successfully developed the earliest cloud computing framework in China. Of course, after Ali first tasted the sweetness, he began to shift to open source software on a large scale. At the same time, they are more and more willing to build wheels internally, and have successively launched their own open source systems in big data analysis, databases and microservice frameworks.

By 2019, Alibaba Cloud has been able to support Taobao's peak access pressure without any obvious computing power bottleneck, including the subsequent Double 11 events, which can perfectly support its upstream business. With the launch of Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Tencent, and have also launched their own cloud services. However, most of them are based on the OpenStack open source architecture. After 2000, the cloud computing service of cloud native technology driven by container technology has become a new technical direction. AI, IoT and big data have become important drivers of cloud computing. Today, the driving force of cloud computing is no longer to pursue low-cost hardware to support massive Internet services, but to provide IT infrastructure services to enterprises and individuals who need to use it more conveniently through cloud computing technology. The cloud computing centers of these Internet giants are no longer running ordinary PC hardware, but have become real enterprise-level hardware again, but the era of IOE has passed. Various cloud computing models, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc., provide users with very diverse choices.