Alibaba Cloud: Helping Enterprises Harness The Potential Of Cloud
As more and more enterprises are opting for the cloud-based business strategies to achieve better agility and meet the ever changing demands of customers, the cloud computing market is growing manyfold. Corroborating this fact is the latest research report by MarketsandMarkets which forecasts the global cloud computing market to become USD 623.3 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 18 percent. While businesses are increasingly investing in cloud solutions, they are encountering numerous challenges in terms of higher deployment costs, security vulnerabilities, system availability and interoperability, both during and in the aftermath of cloud transition due to lack of enterprise-wide cloud migration strategy. Moreover, efficient cloud adoption is not merely about relocating enterprise applications into the cloud environment; ensuring optimal load balancing is imperative for the success of any cloud migration initiative, which requires extensive experience and domain knowledge. Perfectly positioned to help businesses easily migrate to the cloud environment by addressing all the aforementioned issues is Alibaba Cloud, a business unit and data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group.Proven Technologies that Support Alibaba Group’s Daily Operations
Alibaba Cloud, with ample experience of successfully supporting Alibaba Group’s various business units ranging from e-commerce, fintech, logistics, digital marketing, and media and entertainment, offers end-to-end cloud services along with comprehensive suite of cloud solutions to help clients harness the potential of cloud computing. Most of Alibaba Group's core systems are already running on Alibaba Cloud's platform.
Recently Alibaba Cloud supported one of the largest e-commerce fests 11.11 Global Shopping Festival. Tapping into its strong foundation, Alibaba Cloud handled extreme scalability, processing USD 1 billion of GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) in the first 68 seconds of the event; volume hit USD 10 billion of GMV in under 30 minutes. Overall, Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure handled a record-shattering USD 38.4 billion of GMV in 24 hours with zero downtime.
“Applications running on the cloud demand high elasticity, availability and scalability, that too on demand, and are to be supported by the necessary infrastructure. Apsara Operating System processed around 970 PB of data to support the peak performance of 544,000 orders per second, setting a new world record during 11.11,” said Dr Alex Li, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud South Asia. “In India, we are offering the products and solutions powering the largest global shopping festival and with our successful experience, we are able to share with local customers more insights into how industries such as e-commerce can benefit from cloud computing technologies.”
It is noteworthy that PolarDB, a database developed by Alibaba Cloud, supported sales activity with a peak of 87 million requests processed per second. The new generation cloud-native database combines performance with compatibility and availability of traditional enterprise databases in a cost-effective manner. PolarDB with its scalability, elasticity, and high availability features enable IT system to easily overcome the hardware failures and support seamless online business activities.
“Given how rapidly Indian businesses are growing, it is essential for companies of all sizes to have access to reliable, cost-efficient but high-performance cloud native databases. PolarDB is compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, supporting up to 100TB of data, and with its availability in India, we believe more local businesses can benefit from the right technology to excel in the global technology race in the future,” said Dr. Feifei Li, President and Senior Fellow of Database Systems, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, Database and Storage Lab, DAMO academy.
Driving Cloud Innovations through Strategic Partnerships with Industry Leaders
As APAC’s number one cloud service providers according to Gartner, Alibaba Cloud is focused on building a strong IaaS and PaaS platform, so that the company can attract more world leading SaaS partners to grow and innovate with them. To date, Alibaba Cloud has partnered with some of the reputed industry leaders such as MongoDB, SAP, Salesforce, Siemens, Tableau, so that the company can combine the platform’s leading computing capabilities with partners world class industrial solutions to bring even greater benefits to users of Alibaba Cloud.
“We strive to build an open and collaborative ecosystem, so that we can work with our partners to develop world leading solutions for our ecosystem users around the world,” affirms Dr Alex Li. “We welcome SaaS partners from India to join us in our business journey, so that we can empower them with our know-how and help them grow into global businesses too.”
Take MongoDB for instance, as part of the exclusive partnership, Alibaba Cloud will offer customers both community and enterprise versions of MongoDB via Alibaba Cloud, bringing MongoDB’s leading database solutions to the global markets that Alibaba Cloud operates in, offering customers an easy access to the database in an cost effective manner.
Intelligent Defense Mechanism through Human-Machine Collaboration
Protecting customer’s data security is Alibaba Cloud’s utmost priority. Every day, Alibaba Cloud face a barrage of cyberattacks that are continually evolving. With the massive scale of the cloud, defending against such attacks is no easy feat, especially when safeguarding mission critical applications and resources for enterprise customers.
In order to tackle the ever-changing security threats, Alibaba Cloud’s security experts work closely with AIbased tools to enable robust security solutions. Based on the accumulated PB-level historical attack and defence data- a capacity that is equivalent to that of tens of millions of HD movies, Alibaba Cloud is able to churn up the data to train AI intelligently. In essence, Alibaba Cloud’s intelligent security solution is not just an AIenabled solution, but a comprehensive one that is based on years of experience, as well as the product of cutting-edge research by industry experts.
“We provide enterprise-level security services for over 200 thousand enterprises globally, helping them effectively defend against cyber-attacks. Our intelligent security solutions can easily compile and analyze the attack data to better deter future risks. The intelligent security agents by collaborating with each other help to defend against large-scale security attacks and allow security experts to focus on research for advanced threat detection mechanisms,” explains Dr Alex Li.
Dr. Feifei Li, President And Senior Fellow Of Database Systems, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, Database And Storage Lab, Damo Academy.
Recently, Alibaba Cloud became the first public cloud provider in the world to secure the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) Certification, an entertainment industry recognised accolade, endorsing its platform’s security, scalability and flexibility. It also completed the Good "x" Practice (GxP) readiness assessment for the healthcare industry under the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations on Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures (ERES) and obtained the highest Level 3 assessment in TISAX (Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange) in an audit conducted by PwC in Germany. These international recognitions are key to Alibaba Cloud's ongoing expansion and drives engagement and understanding between the company, regulators and clients in new markets. As part of its commitment to complying with local regulations and industry standards across 20 global regions, Alibaba Cloud has obtained more than 70 security and compliance accreditations worldwide.
How Alibaba Cloud Powers the Biggest 11.11 Shopping Festival
11.11 Shopping Festival, an international e-commerce event organised by Alibaba Group has been setting new standards in the global online shopping space by continually generating massive revenues while delivering first-class retail experience to consumers. The recent 11.11 shopping event in 2019 has recorded record-breaking revenue of USD 38.4 billion, which is 1360 times of the inaugural 11.11 shopping festival in 2009. Alibaba Group engineered the event with the help of its data intelligence backbone- Alibaba Cloud that effectively handled the event with zero down time by sustaining USD 38.4 billion GMV.
Here are some of the novel technologies supporting one of the largest shopping events in the world:
• X-Dragon Server: It seamlessly integrates the computing platforms including the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) bare metal server and virtual machines in a single architecture for ultimate flexibility, agility, performance and costeffectiveness.
• OceanBase and POLARDB Databases: The two database products successfully supported the sales activity with peak requests processed at 61 million per second and 87 million per second.
• RDMA Network: The RDMA-based cloud storage and e-commerce database server easily processed the large amount of order and traffic during peak sale hours. Currently, dozens of Alibaba Cloud data centers support the RDMA network, which significantly reduces latency by up to 90 percent.
• Apsara Operating System: It processed around 970 PB of data to support the peak performance of 544,000 orders per second, and provided customized shopping experience and recommendations for customers in real time.
“We provide enterprise-level security services for over 200 thousand enterprises globally, helping them effectively defend against cyber-attacks. Our intelligent security solutions can easily compile and analyze the attack data to better deter future risks. The intelligent security agents by collaborating with each other help to defend against large-scale security attacks and allow security experts to focus on research for advanced threat detection mechanisms,” explains Dr Alex Li.
Dr. Feifei Li, President And Senior Fellow Of Database Systems, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, Database And Storage Lab, Damo Academy.
Recently, Alibaba Cloud became the first public cloud provider in the world to secure the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) Certification, an entertainment industry recognised accolade, endorsing its platform’s security, scalability and flexibility. It also completed the Good "x" Practice (GxP) readiness assessment for the healthcare industry under the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations on Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures (ERES) and obtained the highest Level 3 assessment in TISAX (Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange) in an audit conducted by PwC in Germany. These international recognitions are key to Alibaba Cloud's ongoing expansion and drives engagement and understanding between the company, regulators and clients in new markets. As part of its commitment to complying with local regulations and industry standards across 20 global regions, Alibaba Cloud has obtained more than 70 security and compliance accreditations worldwide.
“Alibaba Cloud believes in operating according to local rules and regulations, so that local businesses can truly enjoy our cloud computing offerings without hesitation. We don’t only see ourselves as a cloud computing company, we see ourselves as business partners to our customers. We want to empower and educate the market with what we know best, so that collaboratively we can achieve even greater success as partners,” concludes Dr Alex Li.
In India, we are offering the products and solutions powering the largest global shopping festival and with our successful experience, we are able to share with local customers more insights into how industries such as e-commerce can benefit from cloud computing technologies
How Alibaba Cloud Powers the Biggest 11.11 Shopping Festival
11.11 Shopping Festival, an international e-commerce event organised by Alibaba Group has been setting new standards in the global online shopping space by continually generating massive revenues while delivering first-class retail experience to consumers. The recent 11.11 shopping event in 2019 has recorded record-breaking revenue of USD 38.4 billion, which is 1360 times of the inaugural 11.11 shopping festival in 2009. Alibaba Group engineered the event with the help of its data intelligence backbone- Alibaba Cloud that effectively handled the event with zero down time by sustaining USD 38.4 billion GMV.
Here are some of the novel technologies supporting one of the largest shopping events in the world:
• X-Dragon Server: It seamlessly integrates the computing platforms including the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) bare metal server and virtual machines in a single architecture for ultimate flexibility, agility, performance and costeffectiveness.
• OceanBase and POLARDB Databases: The two database products successfully supported the sales activity with peak requests processed at 61 million per second and 87 million per second.
• RDMA Network: The RDMA-based cloud storage and e-commerce database server easily processed the large amount of order and traffic during peak sale hours. Currently, dozens of Alibaba Cloud data centers support the RDMA network, which significantly reduces latency by up to 90 percent.
• Apsara Operating System: It processed around 970 PB of data to support the peak performance of 544,000 orders per second, and provided customized shopping experience and recommendations for customers in real time.
