Most folks will by now have heard of Alibaba, the giant Chinese conglomerate, with business interests that include retail, financial services, logistics, media, and digital branding and marketing. The technology backbone underpinning these business units, Alibaba Cloud, is the third largest cloud provider globally, behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. And while Alibaba Cloud provides broadly similar offerings to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, it does have a few surprises.
A relative newcomer to the international cloud market, Alibaba Cloud has deep pockets, and a keen desire to get ahead of Amazon globally. In April of this year they announced plans to invest $28 billion in infrastructure over the next 36 months. Did I mention they have deep pockets? This investment will go to building data centers, custom operating systems, and semiconductors for hardware-accelerated solutions.
[ Also on InfoWorld: 14 ways AWS beats Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud ]
To quickly put Amazon and Alibaba in perspective, remember that Amazon is a reseller. They own inventory and the supply chain and sell directly to the customer. Alibaba is a marketplace, and merely connects buyers and sellers. This has a couple of consequences. First, Amazon’s supply chain and inventory management systems are considered competitive advantages, so you won’t see them selling supply chain solutions that leverage their experience. Second, the profit margins are much higher for Alibaba (23.3 percent vs. Amazon’s 4.1 percent in 2019). This gives Alibaba Cloud a lot more cash to invest back into their offerings.
Here are six ways Alibaba Cloud beats or rivals the other leading cloud providers.
Highest number of services
Amazon Web Services has 175 services. In the last half of 2019 Alibaba announced 597 new products and 300 solutions to its portfolio. There is literally something for everyone here. So much so, the choice is overwhelming. Alibaba Cloud is targeting both enterprises and SMBs, and there’s bound to be a solution, from pig farming (really) to finance that meets your needs, if you can find it. (Hint: Get a partner to help with this if you’re setting up in Asia.)
Computational storage
Computational storage is an old idea whose time has finally come. Given the vast amounts of data being processed today, there is no choice but to optimize the hardware paths that the data takes from disk to application, and push down the computation as close to the storage as possible. A draft standard for computational storage was released in December 2019, but proprietary hardware for it also exists, mostly limited to high-end custom computers like the Nvidia DGX series.
Because Alibaba Cloud supports the ecommerce group of Alibaba, it’s used to process some truly outstanding volumes of data, with similarly impressive low-latency access. For example, during “singles day” Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB database processed Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) worth $30 billion in 24 hours, with a huge spike in the first hour of $12 billion, as shoppers rushed to buy before merchants ran out of stock. With that much revenue at stake, you can see why Alibaba Cloud pays so much attention to the databases supporting the event — and one of the techniques they use is computational storage.
There is a lot to computational storage, and it’s rapidly evolving. At the most basic level, PolarDB uses FPGAs to perform transparent compression of the data, whereby the data is decompressed within the data path and the kernel driver doesn’t know the difference. This can result in up to a 50% reduction in query times for some of the most common queries, and on average is about 30%. This is just with compression push-down, and there’s still some performance to be extracted as additional firmware is developed.
Database compatibility and performance
PolarDB is the main database offering 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 was designed with hardware acceleration in mind, like the previously mentioned computational storage, and it uses RDMA to connect storage and compute nodes, removing the I/O bottleneck.
Alibaba takes a somewhat different tack to database migration. Rather than offer a proprietary database along with migration tools, they’ve made PolarDB compatible with most of the databases used in commercial environments. There are versions that can run queries from MySQL, PostgreSQL, and a large subset of Oracle Database. By design you can probably run your application unchanged on PolarDB. This is a significantly easier path to the cloud than porting application logic.
Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN)
Alibaba Cloud operates their own inter-regional network, meaning that you can control latency and bandwidth between the parts of your application that operate in different regions. Other providers use the public Internet to connect regions, leaving you at the mercy of regional congestion.
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