Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud#

Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) is the dominant public cloud in mainland China and the fourth-largest globally by revenue. Catalog shape mirrors AWS closely; the operator with AWS muscle memory picks it up quickly. Two parallel deployments (international and China) with different account systems, ICP requirements, and service availability matter to anyone who actually runs there.

Account model#

  • Account, the unit of billing and isolation.

  • Resource Group, in-account grouping for IAM and reporting.

  • RAM (Resource Access Management), Alibaba’s IAM. Users, groups, roles, policies.

  • Region, geographically isolated. The China and international regions are administered separately; a “global” account cannot reach China-region resources without a separate China account and ICP filing.

Catalog at a glance#

Layer

Headline services

Compute

ECS (VMs), ACK (Kubernetes), Function Compute (FaaS), Serverless App Engine (SAE), ECI (container instances).

Storage

OSS (object), ESSD (block), NAS (file), Archive.

Database

RDS (MySQL / PostgreSQL / SQL Server), PolarDB, Tablestore (NoSQL), AnalyticDB, Lindorm.

Networking

VPC, SLB (load balancer), CEN (Cloud Enterprise Network), DCDN, Anycast EIP.

Identity

RAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, SAML / OIDC federation.

Observability

CloudMonitor, Log Service (SLS), Tracing Analysis, ARMS.

Messaging

MNS, MQ for RocketMQ, MQ for Kafka, EventBridge.

AI / ML

PAI (Platform for AI), Qwen / Tongyi LLM Service, Image / Video Intelligence.

CLI and SDKs#

The aliyun CLI plus the language SDKs (alibabacloud-*). Shape: aliyun <service> <verb> [args].

$ aliyun configure                          # interactive credential setup
$ aliyun ecs DescribeInstances
$ aliyun oss ls oss://my-bucket
$ aliyun cs DescribeClusters                # ACK / Kubernetes

China-specific concerns#

  • ICP filing is required to serve public traffic in mainland China; allow weeks for filing approval.

  • Account separation between the international site (alibabacloud.com) and the China site (aliyun.com); a single account cannot span both.

  • Cross-region links to non-China regions go through Express Connect plus a partner; latency to US / EU is high.

When to pick Alibaba#

  • The workload serves mainland China users and the operator cannot route through a hyperscaler’s China region (AWS Ningxia, Azure China by 21Vianet).

  • Cost is the driver in Asia-Pacific outside China; ECS / OSS pricing is often cheaper than AWS in the region.

  • The team already operates on Aliyun and the integration is in place.

When to pick something else#

  • Outside Asia-Pacific the network and support footprint is thinner; defaults to AWS / Azure / GCP.

  • Compliance with non-Chinese frameworks (FedRAMP, ISMAP, IRAP) is required and the Alibaba region of interest is not certified.

Datacenter locations#

Code

Location

cn-qingdao

Qingdao, China

cn-beijing

Beijing, China

cn-zhangjiakou

Zhangjiakou, China

cn-huhehaote

Hohhot, China

cn-wulanchabu

Ulanqab, China

cn-hangzhou

Hangzhou, China

cn-shanghai

Shanghai, China

cn-nanjing

Nanjing, China (local region)

cn-fuzhou

Fuzhou, China (local region)

cn-wuhan-lr

Wuhan, China (local region)

cn-shenzhen

Shenzhen, China

cn-heyuan

Heyuan, China

cn-guangzhou

Guangzhou, China

cn-chengdu

Chengdu, China

cn-hongkong

Hong Kong (China region)

ap-southeast-1

Singapore (international)

ap-southeast-3

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (international)

ap-southeast-5

Jakarta, Indonesia (international)

ap-southeast-6

Manila, Philippines (international)

ap-southeast-7

Bangkok, Thailand (international)

ap-northeast-1

Tokyo, Japan (international)

ap-northeast-2

Seoul, South Korea (international)

us-west-1

Silicon Valley, USA (international)

us-east-1

Virginia, USA (international)

eu-central-1

Frankfurt, Germany (international)

eu-west-1

London, United Kingdom (international)

me-east-1

Dubai, UAE (international)

me-central-1

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (partner region)

na-south-1

Mexico (international)

References#

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