Alibaba Cloud - Experts & Thought Leaders

Latest Alibaba Cloud news & announcements

Alibaba Cloud dominates cloud database management

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been named a Pioneer in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS) for the fifth year in a row. Evaluation criteria Gartner evaluates cloud DBMS vendors based on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, with criteria across 15 critical areas, including product or service, customer experience, market understanding, offering (product) strategy, and innovation, to determine their placement in the Magic Quadrant. As per Gartner, “Pioneers may represent diverse cloud ecosystems, of which their cloud DBMS is a part, or have good interoperation with such systems. These vendors demonstrate consistently high customer satisfaction and strong customer support.”  Data management “We are honoured to be named a pioneer in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud DBMS report for the fifth year in a row,” said Dr. Feifei Li, President of the Database Products Business at Alibaba Cloud. “In the era when effective data management becomes a crucial infrastructure for business operation in a range of industries as well as for generative AI development, we remain committed to delivering cutting-edge and high-performance solutions that empower businesses to harness the full potential of their data.” Cloud-native innovation Alibaba Cloud introduced DMS: OneMeta+OneOps, a platform that enables unified management of data sources Alibaba Cloud offers a broad range of self-developed, cloud-native database products, including relational database PolarDB, data warehouse AnalyticDB, multimodal database Lindorm, and the Data Management Service (DMS), and constantly upgrades its product capabilities. At its flagship event Apsara Conference in 2024, to help organisations efficiently manage their data and unleash value, Alibaba Cloud introduced DMS: OneMeta+OneOps, a platform that enables unified management of data sources in databases, data warehouses, and data lakes across multiple cloud environments. The platform will boost data utilisation rates by 10 times. Diverse and open ecosystem Alibaba Cloud is committed to establishing a diverse and open ecosystem with database vendors. Through collaboration with global partners such as MongoDB, ClickHouse, and SelectDB, Alibaba Cloud provides a variety of options for third-party database products, open-source products, and integrated solutions to support customers’ changing demands. Alibaba Cloud’s cloud-native database innovations as well as its partner ecosystem have been widely adopted by companies across diverse industries from finance, retail, and internet, to generative AI builders. MiniMax API Platform Embedded with built-in AI inference capability, Lindorm provides large-scale data storage and high-performance data MiniMax, an AI technology company in China, has leveraged Alibaba Cloud's multimodal database Lindorm as its underlying data service to build the MiniMax API Platform and GenAI application Hailuo AI. Embedded with built-in AI inference capability, Lindorm provides large-scale data storage and high-performance data retrieval capabilities, supporting MiniMax to quickly build its intelligent AI search services. TNG eWallet TNG Digital operates Malaysia’s largest fintech platform, TNG eWallet, serving over 22 million verified users and supporting payments for more than 2 million merchants nationwide. It worked with Alibaba Cloud to support its growing user base while ensuring a seamless experience. During the eMADANI event, TNG eWallet maintained a stable service with zero downtime, supported by Alibaba Cloud's advanced and secure cloud products.  PolarDB, ApsaraDB By utilising the cloud-native database PolarDB, the platform effectively managed a large volume of transactions, ensuring a seamless customer experience even during peak periods. Additionally, Alibaba Cloud provides the NoSQL database ApsaraDB for MongoDB to support TNG Digital eWallet to explore business opportunities through AI innovations. Secure, scalable, and efficient ZA Bank, the first and largest digital bank in Hong Kong, has fully migrated to Alibaba Cloud database services ZA Bank, the first and largest digital bank in Hong Kong, has fully migrated to Alibaba Cloud database services to achieve secure, scalable, and efficient data management.  By adopting Alibaba Cloud relational database ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL within its core system, ZA Bank can quickly adjust computing resources and storage capacity based on business demand. Multi-layered security protections This on-demand scalability allows the bank to effectively manage traffic fluctuations.  Additionally, RDS MySQL provides multi-layered security protections, including data encryption, access control, security auditing, and DDoS protection to ensure data security and privacy, while meeting compliance requirements.

Alibaba Cloud's ACS: Cost-effective container service

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced the international debut of its innovative Alibaba Cloud Container Compute Service (ACS), designed to simplify and optimise workload deployment using container technology. ACS will be available for international customers starting from January 2025. ACS, which uses Kubernetes as its interface, offers a serverless container service that provides compute resources compliant with container standards. Optimisation of costs This new product eliminates the need for users to manage underlying nodes and clusters, significantly reducing costs and technical barriers associated with container deployment. It also allows customers to pay-as-you-go, helping them to avoid over allocating, and scale on demand, enabling the optimisation of costs during periods of high and low usage.   "As the deployment of workloads on container technology becomes increasingly prevalent, we developed a more accessible solution that would anticipate the evolving needs of our customers," said Jiangwei Jiang, General Manager of Infrastructure Products, Alibaba Cloud. Benefits in terms of efficiency The benefits in terms of efficiency and resource optimisation have made containers a mainstream action plan Jiang added: "ACS represents a big step forward in how businesses can utilise container technology, offering cost-efficiency and ease of use to support businesses unleashing productivity." Container technology, a form of virtualisation that bundles programs with everything they need to run, makes it easy to deploy applications consistently across different hardware and systems. The benefits in terms of efficiency and resource optimisation have made containers a mainstream development method. AI deployments According to Gartner, the container management market has experienced over 20% growth in the past year, with projections indicating a market value of US$4.5 billion by 2028. Gartner also predicts that by 2027, more than 75% of all AI deployments will utilise container technology as the underlying compute environment. Addressing challenges in container adoption ACS is designed to overcome the complexities associated with Kubernetes setup ACS is designed to overcome the complexities associated with Kubernetes configuration, resource management, and on-demand elasticity. By integrating containers and resources based on Alibaba Cloud's Shenlong architecture to allow maximum scaling of computing resources, ACS offers a solution capable of reducing computing power costs by up to 55%. "ACS has transformed the container orchestration service into a comprehensive computing product. Users benefit by paying only for the compute capacity that they use,” Jiang added. Kubernetes management methods This product is fully compatible with Kubernetes technologies and supports seamless migration to the cloud for both open-source ecosystems as well as self-developed products. This is notable in that users can continue using familiar Kubernetes management methods and file formats. There is also no need to pre-purchase nodes so users can simply declare their workload requirements and ACS will match them with the necessary underlying compute resources. This minimises the demand for additional costs and human resources in infrastructure maintenance.  Proven technology recognised by customer and industry  Alibaba Cloud Container Service has been applied across a wide range of industries Alibaba Cloud Container Service supports different architectures and can be deployed in multiple cloud environments including public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. Currently, Alibaba Cloud Container Service has been applied across a wide range of industries.  Moka, a pioneering HR management SaaS company in China, has already experienced significant benefits from implementing ACS. The maintenance-free nature of ACS clusters has allowed Moka to focus on core business priorities rather than infrastructure management. Additionally, the on-demand scaling and pay-per-use model has given Moka needed flexibility, especially during peak recruitment seasons. Hybrid cloud and edge scenarios Recently, Alibaba Cloud has been named a pioneer in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management for the second consecutive year. The company’s broad product portfolio, offering solutions for both hybrid cloud and edge scenarios, saturation across the Alibaba Group ecosystem, and market leadership in China all contributed to this important recognition.

AI leadership: Alibaba Cloud in Forrester Wave Q4 report

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been recently named a pioneer in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms Q4 2024 report. Alibaba Cloud believes this designation recognises its depth of its cloud and AI offerings and strategy, its significant global presence, as well as the ability to provide its global customers with a wide range of products and services. This is the first time Alibaba Cloud has been recognised as a pioneer among other significant public cloud platform providers in this report.  AI innovation with AI models Alibaba Cloud is named one of four pioneers among nine global vendors evaluated in Forrester’s report Alibaba Cloud is named one of four pioneers among nine global vendors evaluated in Forrester’s report, with the second highest scores in the current offering and strategy categories.  The report states that Alibaba Cloud showed its capacity for AI innovation with homegrown AI models, breadth of foundation model choices and model-as-a-service (MaaS) innovation. The report also states that the core infrastructure and model-as-a-service capabilities enable Alibaba Cloud to provide a major model repository for AI across China.  Cloud-native infrastructure “Alibaba has upped the ante on serverless beyond AI, packaging its powerful cloud-native infrastructure into more accessible offerings for both developers and operators, with data and analytics as a stand out,” said Forrester in the report. “Alibaba is a good fit for Chinese-based enterprises or international corporations requiring cloud scale across APAC and parts of Africa, Europe, and Latin America,” the report added. AI development services The Forrester report is a 30-criterion evaluation of the nine most significant public cloud platform providers The Forrester report is a 30-criterion evaluation of the nine most significant public cloud platform providers. Each provider is evaluated on the strengths of their current offerings, strategy and market presence. Alibaba Cloud has achieved the highest possible assessment score (5.0 out of 5.0) in 17 criteria, including database, data integration and governance services, container and Kubernetes services, serverless/FaaS services, compute, IoT, storage services as well as AI development services.  AI capabilities “Expanding our cloud-native infrastructure and AI capabilities in the public cloud space to better support our clients is a top priority. We are honoured to be recognised by Forrester for our efforts in this critical area,” said Jingren Zhou, Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.  “To address the increasing demands of AI, we are dedicated to continuously enhancing our ability to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable cloud products and AI applications to our customers.” Demands for robust AI computing Qwen, Alibaba Cloud’s large language model, has seen significant adoption since its intro in April 2023 At Apsara Conference 2024, Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship event hosted in September, Alibaba Cloud unveiled a revamped full-stack infrastructure designed to meet the growing demands for robust AI computing. It also released over 100 of its newly-launched large language models, Qwen 2.5, to the global open-source community.  Qwen, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large language model, has seen significant adoption since its introduction in April 2023. The Qwen models have been downloaded over 40 million times on open-source platforms such as Hugging Face and ModelScope, and have inspired the creation of more than 78,000 derivative models. AI model community As a creator of the MaaS concept and an advocate of open source, Alibaba Cloud also build ModelScope, China’s biggest AI model community. It hosts over 10,000 models and serves more than 8 million developers.  On the global presence, Alibaba Cloud continues to expand its global reach, currently operating 85 data centres in 28 regions globally. In May 2024, Alibaba Cloud announced its plan to launch its first cloud region in Mexico, and to establish additional data centres in its key markets, including Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea, in the next three years.

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