Alibaba has been positioned to become a data company since the inception of
AliCloud (or Aliyun) in 2009. In 2010, its first data analytic tool was created for its SME loan business unit (now a division of Ant Financial); the aim was to automate credit risk profiling of the borrowing merchants. In 2011, AliCloud debuted its own general-purpose computing system called Apsara, which is the foundation for the majority of the public cloud services offered by AliCloud.
By 2013, the
Apsara cluster was scaled up to 5,000 servers with hundreds of petabytes (PB) of storage and hundreds of thousands of CPU cores, making this computational engine one of the most powerful globally. The proprietary technology provided two key benefits.
Since 2014, its technology has been recognized as one of the leading platforms globally. Some of its key milestone include -
AliCloud Withstood Hackers Attack - AliCloud was subjected to one of the most aggressive attacks on the Internet. It lasted for 14 hours with peak traffic of 454 gigabytes per second. Its technology withstood the attack without service outage, further demonstrating its security capabilities.
Alicloud Best Algorithms - AliCloud's FuxiSort set new world records for the GraySort and MinuteSort benchmarks in both the Daytona (general-purpose sorting) and Indy (sorting only 100B records) categories. Specifically, AliCloud's technology took less than 6.5
minutes to sort 100TB of data; much faster than the previous records of 23.4 minutes set in 2014 by Apache Spark and Hadoop's 72 minutes in 2013, according to Sort Benchmark.
AliCloud formally released its big data service platform, called Max Compute. With it, users can process within six hours 100 PB of data, which is equal to 100mn high-resolution movies. As illustrated below, there are many products that are in the process of launch, implying further upside to revenue growth in the next several years
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How Cloud Computing in China is Threatening American Dominance ?
