Alibaba Cloud Vs. AWS- Which Is Right For Your Business?

Tags: cloud, cloudskills
Published: 2021-02-25 06:45:21

The cloud computing market reached the peak in recent years. AWS remains the leader because of its first-to-market benefits and also comprehensive portfolio, however other players are starting to provide equivalent offerings. Alibaba Cloud is fast gaining on the leaders and, driven essentially by the perception that it offers a better value proposition than AWS and the other top players, is now in fifth place overall. 

Most of the time, we focus on the comparison of “big three” providers: Amazon Web Services(AWS), Google Cloud Platform and microsoft azure. They are leading the cloud market but that’s not the whole story. In recent years, other secondary providers like Alibaba cloud have made their way into the market. Here we’ll see comparison between Alibaba cloud vs AWS. Before digging to the comparison, let’s have a look at each one in detail.

#What Is Alibaba Cloud?
Since its inception in 2009, Alibaba cloud has been leading in cloud computing and AI and providing services to various enterprises, government organizations and developers of more than 200 countries. The company primarily focused on the Chinese market and then eventually spread to neighboring countries. It was not till 2015 that Alibaba cloud began to work globally with investment of $1 billion. Same year, it opened its first data center in US and launched in Europe a year later. Growth of Alibaba cloud is attributed in part to the rising chinese economy, as the chinese government continues digitalization and bringing its agencies online and into the cloud. Also, as the principal E-commerce system in china, Alibaba holds the status as “Amazon of Asia”. It’s difficult to imagine a cloud provider could gain such achievements, but company has its sights set on surpassing AWS to dominate the worldwide cloud computing market.

#What Is AWS Cloud?
Amazon Web Services(AWS) is one of the most popular and broadly adopted cloud platforms. It offers more than 175 services from data centers globally. AWS has 77 availability zones where its servers are located. Those service regions are divided to let users set geographical limits on their services, while providing security by diversifying the physical locations in which data is held. Since 2006, AWS has provided secure and reliable services for all size companies. With AWS, users can requisition compute, storage, database and other internet-based services to power their business. As users need to pay just for what they use with no upfront capital costs and low operating costs, AWS becomes the most cost-effective way to deliver computational resources, stored data and other apps to end-users. 

#Alibaba Cloud Vs. AWS-
**1. Global Coverage And Stability-**
Cloud infrastructure of Alibaba cloud is spread across 22 regions and 63 availability zones, with various availability zones in each region. Zones may have one or more data centers. Through a single dashboard, organizations can manage their instances even if these are spread across various locations. Alibaba cloud has a largest network in country china and has its own content delivery network( CDN) with more than 2800 nodes across 70 countries in six continents, ensuring fast and reliable access to your web app from anywhere. 

AWS takes advantage of widest coverage among cloud service providers, having twice the number of regions as the next largest provider. AWS serves more than 245 countries through a network of 24 regions and 77 availability zones with regions having some availability zones and data centers. Latest AWS innovations include Local Zones, that are ideal for high availability and fault tolerance in low-latency apps. 

**2. Market Share-**
According to the survey, AWS led the globe’s cloud computing market with 33% market share and Microsoft azure came in second place with 18%, Alibaba cloud came in fifth place just a fer percentage points behind third and fourth placers Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud.

Market share for 2021 shows a continuation of the upward demand for cloud computing during pandemic, because many businesses shift their workloads to the cloud. Cloud computing demand increases significantly, Alibaba cloud grows even more rapidly, though it probably won’t overtake AWS as world’s top-cloud-provider anytime soon. All things considered, it’s already the Asia-Pacific market leader as of May 2021.

**3. Storage-**
Alibaba ECS provides object, file and block storage products, including object storage system(OSS), Elastic block storage (EBD), and file Storage NAS. One can retrieve and store your data to and from the cloud with OSS. To avoid missing and data corruption in case of adverse events, OSS stores three copies of your files and objects. Over SSL data transfer takes place and data itself is encrypted for extra security. OSS is integrated with the rest of Alibaba Cloud and storage is completely scalable. SLA of Alibaba assures you of more than 99.9% availability and reliability.

AWS also has file, object and block storage products. These are Amazon simple storage service (S3), Amazon elastic file system, Amazon FSx for windows File server, Amazon FSx for Lustre, and Amazon Elastic Block Store. For faster web computing amazon S3 is designed and it is accessible for developers. One of the amazing features is its simple user interface(UI) that allows easy storage, retrieval and access to your data whatever will be your location.  S3 storage containers come in the form of buckets and one can store up to 5TB data. One can download your data any time and also can give you access to your data. 

Amazon EC2 and Alibaba ECS allows to pay only for what you use. So you can start with just the right amount of storage at minimal pricing and add to it as the app grows. Both are scalable and so you should not worry about their capabilities to handle your workloads if you use them. However, while Alibaba has storage services that compare well with AWS, the latter actually has a more extensive product offering.

Know more at- [https://solaceinfotech.com/blog/alibaba-cloud-vs-aws-which-is-right-for-your-business/]