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Alibaba Cloud aims for further global expansion with new features
Wed, 5th Jun 2019
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Alibaba Cloud has announced more than 10 new products and features at its APAC Summit, as well as a new accelerator programme connecting technology partners with the Alibaba ecosystem.

“As the largest public cloud provider in Asia Pacific, Alibaba Cloud is speeding up digital transformation in this region by building a world-class cloud infrastructure and we have also been at the forefront of the rapid development of data intelligence,” says Alibaba Cloud intelligence international president Selina Yuan.

“Today, Alibaba Cloud not only provides infrastructure that underpins the entire Alibaba economy from eCommerce and payment, to logistics and supply chain management, but also ensures inclusiveness, so that our cloud technologies can be accessed by companies of all sizes. We are committed to providing the Asia Pacific region with a cloud service that will drive a highly integrated, best-in-class technology ecosystem.

The new product and feature highlights include:

PolarDB: A MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database built for the cloud that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases at a much lower cost.

It offers scalability, with the architecture of hardware-software co-design. The solution can also scale up to 100TB in storage which helps customers manage big data development.

It can scale up to 88 vCPUs and 710GB of memory and allows customers to pay for usage by the minute, enabling customers to handle peak business traffic while minimising cost.

Alibaba Log Service (SLS): SLS allows customers to automatically collect logs from all your services, applications and platforms, irrespective of whether they are on-premises or in the cloud. SLS allows the log data to be tagged with context derived.

SLS also allows decisions to be taken on this data in near real-time for trend analysis, alerts or visualization.

Support of “Bring Your Own Key”(BYOK): An end-to-end security service which provides customers encryption controls on both hardware and software, protecting customers' data in transit and at rest. The new BYOK feature now supports ECS Cloud Disk, OSS and RDS.

SaaS Accelerator: A platform where technology partners can build and launch SaaS applications and leverage proven business and technology know-how in the Alibaba Economy.

The accelerator helps SaaS providers quickly deploy and test their applications on the cloud, shorten the implementation lifecycle, and accelerate time-to-market.

It enables ecosystem partners, such as enterprises in the eCommerce, lodging, and travel industries, to quickly reach their customers on Alibaba platforms.

It also defines three centres for the SaaS ecosystem: the commercial centre, the capability centre, and the technology centre.

Smart Access Gateway (SAG) Software: An app client that allows endpoint devices such as cell phones, POS and laptops to securely connect with Alibaba Cloud and on-premises data centers in one click, accelerating access to enterprise applications and cloud resources.

Container Registry (ACR) Enterprise Edition: Alibaba Cloud Container Registry (ACR) is a fully-managed container registry that allows developers to store, manage, and deploy container images.

ACR Enterprise Edition is integrated with the Alibaba Cloud Container Service, simplifying customers' deployment to production workflows.

It eliminates the need for customers to operate their own container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure.

ACR hosts customers' container images in a highly available and scalable architecture, where customers can reliably deploy containers and launch applications at a global scale.

Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK): A fully-managed service compatible with Kubernetes to help users focus on their applications rather than managing container infrastructure.

It provides enterprise-level high-performance and flexible management of Kubernetes containerized applications throughout the application lifecycle.

This service simplifies cluster creation and expansion and integrates Alibaba Cloud capabilities in virtualization, storage, network, and security, providing an improved running environment for Kubernetes containerized applications.

Alibaba Cloud has also launched an upgraded service support campaign designed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

SME customers will now be able to benefit from greater access to resources and support from Alibaba Cloud.

Key benefits of the enhanced support and service include dedicated one-on-one presale consultations, 24/7 technical support, a doubling of complimentary tech support tickets and swifter after-sales support.