Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today unveiled at the Apsara Conference 2021 its plan to set up two new data centers in Korea and Thailand to assist local enterprises in their digital innovation journey, in addition to unveiling a slew of products and solutions.

Continuous commitment in Asia-Pacific

As APAC’s leading cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud further expands its footprint by announcing plans to set up data centers in Korea and Thailand in 2022. The data centers will serve as intelligence backbones to support the nations’ digital economies, and businesses on their journey to transform and innovate. Local businesses in Korea of all sizes will be able to deploy mission-critical workloads while enjoying more reliable and secure cloud services with lower latency. While for Thailand, the data center will offer products and solutions that are in line with Thailand 4.0 – the Thai government’s 20-year strategy to promote digital innovation and the development of sustainable technologies.

“As one of the world’s top three cloud service providers, we are committed to bringing our world-class, hyper-scale cloud infrastructure to Korea and Thailand, so that we can support local businesses to be at the forefront of digital transformation,” said Selina Yuan, General Manager of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “With our business insight serving global customers in multiple key industries from retail to finance, logistics and manufacturing, we believe we can support local customers in Korea and Thailand to meet their digitalization needs from both a technology and services perspective.”

To complement its infrastructure investment, Alibaba Cloud has also unveiled technologies, products and solutions to make public cloud more accessible to enterprises and developers, by enhancing its security, availability and improving its adaptability in both cloud native and on-premise environments.

Smarter and secure platform to support hybrid workload

In order to support customers’ ever growing computational needs in the cloud, Alibaba Cloud unveiled its fourth generation of ApasaraCompute Shenlong Architecture that carries leading capabilities in terms of container elasticity, storage, Input and output (IO) performance, latency and chip-level security hardening features.

The self-developed Shenlong architecture is upgraded to support data intensive applications, with storage Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS) increased by 300% to 3 Million IOPS, network Packets Per Second (PPS) increased by more than 100% to 50 Million PPS, while the storage and network IO latencies are decreased to as low as 30 and 16 microseconds, respectively.

In the 4th generation Shenlong architecture, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled the industry’s only large-scale Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking capability with a latency as low as 5 microseconds, to further accelerate data intensive applications on the cloud. For example, the updated Shenlong architecture with RDMA can increase the computing performance in data-intensive AI and big data spark scenarios by 30% compared to the mainstream performance of the Transmission Control Protocol(TCP) network on the cloud.

To support enterprises’ hybrid cloud needs, Alibaba Cloud has launched a new database platform DBStack (based on Kubernetes) that can bring cloud native database systems to enterprises’ on-premise environments. With DBStack, businesses that are not ready to migrate fully onto public cloud can still enjoy the benefits of public cloud securely and conveniently in their on-premise environment, bolstering the digitalization process for finance, transportation, and the telco industries.

Alibaba Cloud has also upgraded its PolarDB to showcase the leading cloud native database that marks three levels of separation, with further decoupling of memory and CPU cores. The three independent layers can be scaled up or down independently with increased elasticity and better high availability and scalability.

A greener cloud for businesses and more opensource for developers

Alibaba Cloud has launched a new energy-saving solution for corporate customers that enhances their energy consumption management and carbon footprint reduction. By leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s data analytics and machine learning technology, the solution offers tools to help customers track carbon emissions, analyze energy consumption, predict electricity generation from new energy sources, and receive recommendations for carbon emission reduction plans and related trading mechanisms.

To continue encouraging collaboration, Alibaba Cloud has open-sourced PolarDB-X (a MySQL-native distributed database) and AI products including DeepRec and Proxima, for developers to benefit from building cloud native, distributed databases and AI-powered searching and advertising services.

Besides open source key codes, Alibaba Cloud has also launched Alibaba AI, an integrated digital intelligence and AI platform that provides an out-of-the-box setting for enterprises to manage their intelligent assets in a simple, secure and efficient way. The one-stop cloud native system offers a series of AI and digital products, ranging from intelligence production, storage, analysis, and development to management, to help businesses capture and capitalize on new growth opportunities presented by digital transformation.

Propelled by Alibaba Cloud’s computing and AI power, companies including those in fashion design, medical research and media are already using the platform to unleash the potential of their digital intelligence.