Alibaba Cloud

Definition

Alibaba Cloud (also known as Aliyun) is Alibaba Group's cloud computing division, offering global infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service products including compute, storage, databases, and AI tooling.

Overview

Alibaba Cloud grew out of the infrastructure Alibaba Group built to run its own e-commerce platforms at massive scale, and was later opened up as a public cloud offering. It provides the same broad categories of services found in other major clouds — virtual machines, object storage, managed databases, container orchestration, and increasingly AI and large-model services — delivered from data centers spanning Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and other regions. Alibaba Cloud is the largest cloud provider in China and a major player across Asia, making it a common choice for companies expanding into or operating within Chinese and broader Asia-Pacific markets, where data residency, latency, and local compliance requirements can favor a regional provider over incumbents like AWS or Azure. Like other major clouds, it supports infrastructure-as-code tooling, managed Kubernetes, and a marketplace of third-party services, and is often evaluated by multinational companies as part of a multi-cloud or China-specific deployment strategy.

Key Features

• Global data center footprint with strong presence across Asia-Pacific
• Elastic Compute Service (ECS) for virtual machine-based workloads
• Object Storage Service (OSS) for scalable, durable storage
• Managed relational and NoSQL database services
• Container Service for Kubernetes for managed container orchestration
• AI and machine learning platform services, including large-model APIs
• Global CDN and networking services for low-latency delivery

Use Cases

Frequently Asked Questions

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