Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group and was founded in September 2009. It is a full hyperscale platform. Its core services include Elastic Compute Service virtual machines, Object Storage Service, managed relational and NoSQL databases, a Kubernetes service, big data and analytics tools such as AnalyticDB, a CDN, and DDoS protection. It also offers AI services built around its Qwen family of large language models. The company says it runs 106 availability zones across 31 regions, and its footprint is densest in mainland China and the wider Asia-Pacific region. That makes it a natural choice for companies that serve Chinese or Asian users, or that need infrastructure inside China alongside global regions. Pricing is mostly usage-based, with pay-as-you-go and subscription billing for each service, so there is no single plan price. Buyers need the pricing calculator or sales to estimate costs. Resources can be managed through the web console, APIs and SDKs, and the aliyun command-line tool. Reviewers on PeerSpot and other sites praise its low prices in Asia, its broad catalogue and how easily it scales. The most common complaints are slow or hard-to-reach support, prices that are hard to pin down for services such as RDS, uneven SDK and API quality, and a console that newcomers find complex. Its ecosystem of third-party integrations and community content outside Asia is also thinner than those of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.