Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Cloud Providers in China

The cloud business is slowly but surely picking up in China as it has in the West. Out of the major multinational providers, only Microsoft Azure offers comprehensive service in China. Amazon in 2014 has introduced a closed limited program for region in Beijing, but this service excludes common services such as Elastic Beanstalk. China, however, has its own homegrown cloud services, principally SinaCloud and AliYun from Sina and Alibaba respectively. Baidu offers a PaaS service but not a full fledged IaaS. Unlike US cloud services, most Chinese cloud services are pay by the month instead of pay by the hour. This arrangement is quite limiting since one would be unable to scale down costs below the monthly unit. This truly adds up when one is talking about thousands of instances.