Why choose Alibaba Cloud? How is it better than other cloud providers? What are the advantages of Alibaba Cloud? In this article, we have answered all these questions, backed by relevant research and technical benefits.
For the last many years, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have been completely dominating the public cloud market. Whether it is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS), the names of these ‘big three’ always emerge on top.
Now the scenario has changed with Alibaba Cloud establishing well in India and has started to take on these big players. In the last two years, Alibaba Cloud has set up data centers, opened offices and hired staff in India. There is vast adoption of Alibaba Cloud seen across the board with Small and medium businesses (SMBs), Enterprises, Start-ups, ISVs and partners adopting Alibaba Cloud solutions for their IT environment.
The exceptional growth of Alibaba Cloud
Founded in 2009, Alibaba Cloud opened its first datacenter in China in 2010 and started offering cloud services in 2011. After a few years in 2015, it announced Singapore as the official headquarters for overseas operations. While the company was still a new player in the market, the cloud services helped it to gain edge in the industry.
In 2018 public cloud market share, Alibaba Cloud entered the top 3 club, beating Google Cloud in the cloud war. As per Gartner, Alibaba Cloud experienced the highest growth in the IaaS sector in 2018 among the top cloud vendors. It grew 92.6% in that year, while AWS and Azure witnessed a growth of 27% and 61%, respectively.
According to Gartner’s Global IT Services Market Share Research 2019, Alibaba Cloud is the number 1 cloud provider in the Asia Pacific (APAC) and number 3 cloud provider in the world.
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What drives the growth of Alibaba Cloud?
The exceptional growth of Alibaba Cloud is driven by its aggressive spending on Research and Development (R&D) for its portfolio of cloud services. Over the last few years, its investment in R&D has been comparatively higher than the other hyper-scale cloud providers.
Other thing that drives the growth of Alibaba Cloud is the scalability provided with the cloud services. When adopting cloud, scalability matters a lot for the businesses, especially for the IaaS category.
Furthermore, the company has been investing hugely for the development of massive datacenters across several regions around the world. It has 63 availability zones in 21 global regions today, with a stronger presence in India and other APAC countries. Malaysia and Indonesia are the countries where Alibaba Cloud is having the longest-standing presence.
“Alibaba has the financial capability to continue this trend and invest in global expansion.”
–Gartner
Why Alibaba Cloud is better than other cloud providers?
There are several advantages of Alibaba Cloud over traditional and other cloud service providers in the world.
1. Higher number of VM processors
When it comes to the number of processors in a virtual machine, Alibaba Cloud provides more processors as compared to traditional and other cloud providers.
This is great for businesses who have heavy server workloads and use mission-critical computing applications. Having additional processors helps in boosting the performance of the application and improving the efficiency of resources usage.
2. Better pricing terms
Most of the cloud service providers offer the purchase term for one or three years. While some providers enable on-demand payment term, some provide pay as you go, and some subscription basis, Alibaba Cloud has got all these purchase terms on offer.
You can buy Alibaba Cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis, reserved instance, subscription, as well as preemptible instance. This helps you to spend money based on your business needs and significantly save the overall costs involved with cloud.
Moreover, you can choose whether you want to pay upfront, avoid upfront costs, or pay partial upfront costs.
3. More cloud storage options
Alibaba Cloud provides all types of cloud storage that a business can ever need. These storage types include object storage, shared file storage, archiving storage, hybrid storage, backup, as well as storage for data transfer and disaster recovery.
Most of the cloud providers don’t provide all these storage types. Alibaba Cloud’s wide variety of storage options helps businesses to avoid compromising on the type of storage actually required by their applications. The storage services provided by Alibaba Cloud are also highly secure and encrypted, so that businesses can store, transfer, and access all their data from anywhere, without the risk of a data breach.
4. Variety of relational database services
If you are a business who is using or looking to use the cloud for a relational database, then no cloud provider is better than Alibaba Cloud. It is because Alibaba Cloud has got the highest number of options and services as part of the relational database.
With Alibaba Cloud, you get ApsaraDB for MySQL, ApsaraDB for MariaDB TX, ApsaraDB RDS for SQL Server, ApsaraDB RDS for PPAS, ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL, ApsaraDB for POLARDB, as well as Distributed Relational Database Service (DRDS). No other provider offers such a variety of relational database services.
Related reading: How can modern businesses ensure success with MongoDB – NoSQL DB vs SQL RDBMS?
5. Content Delivery Network
Coming to Content Delivery Network (CDN), Alibaba Cloud covers all the essential CDN services and features, a business can ever demand.
It has more than 2,800 nodes around the world to accelerate the content delivery to the end-users regardless of their locations. These CDN services support all the major internet service providers (ISPs) globally and offer enterprise-grade accelerate service over the HTTPS. Built for high performance, the Alibaba Cloud CDN is also a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes.
6. Accelerated innovation
All the cloud services provided by Alibaba Cloud help businesses to innovate faster in the market and gain a competitive edge. A few of the Alibaba Cloud services are incomparable to other cloud providers when it comes to enabling innovation. For instance, the big data analytics solutions by Alibaba Cloud come with flexible data modelling, visual job monitoring, data warehousing, intelligent analytics and visualization, and an easy-to-use UI.
Along with big data analytics services, Alibaba Cloud’s database, content delivery network (CDN), and cloud firewall solutions are also known for accelerating the innovation.
7. Cost optimization
When it comes to optimizing or reducing the costs associated with the cloud services, there is no cloud provider better than Alibaba Cloud. For instance, it has come up with an Anti-COVID-19 SME Enablement Program to assist the businesses in their digital transformation during the pandemic. It is providing businesses $300 to adopt the cloud and save on costs.
To maintain the business continuity, Alibaba Cloud is offering solutions like DingTalk, Short Message Service (SMS), Alibaba Mail, etc. These solutions and adoption of Alibaba Cloud can help SMBs and large enterprises to optimize their budgets while transforming digitally.
ZNetLive is the major distributor of Alibaba Cloud in India
Recently, we forged a strong partnership with Alibaba Cloud to bring the innovative cloud services to partners and customers in India. These services include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Content Delivery Network (CDN), Short Message Service (SMS), Cloud Database, and more. As an established distributor of cloud services, ZNetLive is equipped with both the sales and technical knowledge to help customers drive success in this digital era.
Wrapping up:
Despite being a late entrant in the cloud market, Alibaba Cloud has positioned itself among the TOP 3 because of the quality, security, and affordability of its services. Its exceptional growth in the market is enough to show why it is better than most of the cloud providers today.
Switch to Alibaba Cloud today and start with $300 credited in your account.
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