DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports Events Over 2 million developers have joined DZone. Join Today! Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile Manage Email Subscriptions Moderation Admin Console How to Post to DZone Article Submission Guidelines
View Profile
Sign Out
Refcards
Trend Reports
Events
Zones
Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
  1. DZone
  2. Software Design and Architecture
  3. Cloud Architecture
  4. 5G and Alibaba Cloud With Toni Cheng

5G and Alibaba Cloud With Toni Cheng

Let's take a look at Alibaba Cloud and their plans for growth in European markets and push towards 5G.

Chris Ward user avatar by
Chris Ward
CORE ·
Nov. 27, 18 · Interview
Like (1)
Save
Tweet
Share
9.50K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

Do you use a cloud provider? If so, I bet there's a strong chance it's one of the best known three: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. In recent months, a handful of new entrants have entered the cloud market. These include older companies looking into new revenue sources, and large players from Asia entering Western markets. A vast company in China has been making slow inroads into Europe recently (for example, countries that don't have Amazon often use Ali Express), including their cloud service, Alibaba Cloud.

Recently after the 5GTechritory event in Riga, I had an email conversation with Toni Cheng, the general manager for Alibaba cloud in central Europe about the company's plans for 5G and Europe.

What does 5G mean to Alibaba Cloud? What are the products and services you have or plan to have that 5G helps support?

5G allows Alibaba cloud to process and analyze vast volumes of heterogeneous data. Growing data volumes in the 5G era mean higher requirements for computing, processing power, and efficient or in-time analytics. This puts a lot of pressure on existing infrastructure as many global companies still rely on legacy architecture or on-premise data centers, which don't necessarily cope well with scalability. In this context, our products can behave as a hub allowing massive concurrent data input from heterogeneous sources. Other products, such as MaxCompute and OSS, can be combined and, thus, become useful in this scenario, as they deliver massive data analysis and AI capabilities to match the requirements of the 5G era.

Are there any differences between 5G support and enthusiasm between Europe and China or Asia? Any examples of use case projects in both those regions?

China is well-known for leapfrogging to new technologies. For example, it's definitely "mobile first," if not "mobile only" in China, as society has skipped the entire step of the desktop. Similarly, China and Asia are already well ahead with 5G. Our goal is to offer 5G support for both some European-language areas as well as the Chinese/Asian markets. Some of our strategic partners, such as China Mobile and Vodafone, are known to be active drivers and great contributors in launching 5G technology. We work closely with such partners to bring E2E solutions and experiences to European end customers to help them benefit from 5G technologies.

As far as I am aware, Alibaba cloud is new in Europe but pushing hard. What can you offer beyond the current cloud offerings available? What is your approach to attracting customers away from other providers?

First, we supply best-in-class public cloud infrastructure to an increasing number of regions worldwide, including Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Gartner recognized us as the third-largest IaaS vendor globally, our core strengths are AI, Data Analytics, as well as our vertical expertise. Alibaba is one of the biggest e-commerce companies worldwide, and we have used volumes of anonymous data to train our AI, which is the best way for AI to improve over time. We use our cloud-powered, AI and data analytics technology to help thousands of global companies and organizations in verticals such as manufacturing, finance, retail, logistics, and media. Finally, we helped our multi-national companies and partners to go to China, Asia, and Global.

Do you offer EU located data centers?

We run two data centers in Frankfurt and just launched another two availability zones in the United Kingdom in October.

What are the benefits of Alibaba cloud for Developers?

With our global infrastructure, we offer multi-cloud support as well as unique PaaS and SaaS products. We have both Swarm and Kubernetes as orchestrator options so that developers can deploy their Docker-based applications to Alibaba Cloud, as well as other cloud or dedicated hosting environments. For Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) fans, we support Terraform with continued updates, along with new feature development of Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud also supplies in-house orchestration technology called ROS to help orchestrate resource and cloud-based deployment via code.

What are the benefits of Alibaba cloud for business owners?

Innovation-driven technology and solutions that are shared or co-run with our customers – as well as a reliable, global infrastructure. Business owners profit from our vertical expertise and openness to co-innovation with our local business partners. Also, we support start-up partners focused on quick innovation by sharing our experience and co-running solutions with them.

Alibaba Cloud Cloud

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Popular on DZone

  • Upgrade Guide To Spring Data Elasticsearch 5.0
  • Educating the Next Generation of Cloud Engineers With Google Cloud
  • AIOps Being Powered by Robotic Data Automation
  • How To Convert HTML to PNG in Java

Comments

Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com
  • +1 (919) 678-0300

Let's be friends: