Summary: Alibaba Cloud Overview and Features [Key Points]

This is Ohara from the Technical Sales Department

This article summarizes the overview, features, and key points of
Alibaba Cloud (Information current as of May 2018)

Alibaba Cloud Overview

In China, the service is commonly called "Aliyun," while the international version is called "Alibaba Cloud."

■ China's largest public cloud service. (No. 1 in market share in China)

■ It is used as infrastructure for "Singles' Day" (also known as Double Eleven, W11, or Shuang 11) on November 11th, the biggest sales day in the Chinese e-commerce site market, and handles traffic with a distribution scale of "10 billion yuan (approximately 170 billion yen)" in sales every three minutes and "2.8 trillion yen" in sales per day.
* This 2.8 trillion yen is close to Rakuten's annual sales.

■ It is also used as infrastructure for Alipay, the smartphone payment service operated by Alibaba (which has a nearly 60% share of smartphone payment services in China)

■ Official cloud service for the Olympics (long-term contract until 2028)

■Data centers in 18 regions around the world

■ Japanese language support and Japanese yen billing. Invoice payment is also possible. (Overseas region environments can also be purchased in Japanese yen)

■ The control panel can be translated into Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and English

■ You can use services in each country's region, including China, with a single account

■ If you have one account (one contract) with Alibaba Cloud, they will handle the ICP application process for you, which is necessary when developing a website in China: ICP registration and ICP license acquisition. (When opening a website in China, you must complete the "pre-application procedure (ICP registration).")
*For an article about ICP licenses, click [here].

■ With the package menu, data transfer fees for instances (Out) are available at a fixed rate. (However, in this case, there is a data transfer limit.)

■ The package menu includes a free "cybersecurity insurance" plan, covering damages of up to 5 million yen and expenses of up to 200,000 yen (including legal fees, apology advertising costs, labor costs related to recovery, and costs of investigating the cause)

Alibaba Cloud Functional Features

■ DDoS attack prevention function "Anti-DDoS" is implemented as standard. (Abnormal traffic is automatically cleaned and discarded.)

■ Server monitoring is implemented as a standard feature (ECS for VM instances only)

■ It is possible to use only the CDN service. (With a total of over 1,000 nodes, it is possible to cover all regions.)

Open an Alibaba Cloud account

Public cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud require you to register a credit card when opening an account or using their services, but Alibaba Cloud also requires you to submit information that can verify your identity

First, you need to register your credit card information, then apply to the support center to have your credit card activated. (This is what makes it different from other public cloud services.)

 

Once you submit the "identification information" to the support center as shown below, your account opening and registration will be complete. (Uploading your driver's license seems to be the quickest way.) After applying for an account, the application will be complete in about 10 minutes

summary

In my opinion, among the many public cloud services available, Alibaba Cloud may be the best choice if you have the following requirements and uses. There's also a free coupon for 30,000 yen, so if you're interested, why not give it a try?

● I would like to centralize ICP registration and applications.
* In the case of AWS, when launching a server in China, it is necessary to register a Chinese corporation and then open a separate AWS account for China.
● I would like to open a region for Chinese users.
● Company payments can only be made in Japanese yen.
● I would like to stabilize data transfer volume charges to a certain extent. ...etc.

We also handle cloud design, construction, operation, maintenance, and monitoring for Alibaba Cloud, so please feel free to contact us at Beyond!