In recent years, the name Alibaba Cloud has come into the spotlight of all system providers and information companies, indicating that Alibaba Cloud is rapidly expanding worldwide.

According to the 2020 Gartner "Market Share: Global IT Services Industry 2020" report, Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, currently ranks third globally in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market share and first in the Asian cloud market. Have you ever wondered how Alibaba Cloud has managed to thrive amidst the competition from the three major cloud giants, Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? Moreover, renowned enterprises such as Asia Airlines, Shiseido, KPMG, Alipay, and Taobao have all partnered with Alibaba Cloud, becoming either collaborators or strategic allies. What led these enterprises to choose Alibaba Cloud?

Let's first examine one of the most famous cases: Alibaba Cloud's involvement in the Double 11 event of Taobao. On that day, the event attracted hundreds of millions of visitors to Taobao's website, with the need to process up to 540,000 orders per second. Apart from the high demand for servers, there were also extremely high requirements for network and database performance. Ultimately, Alibaba Cloud successfully maintained the operation of Taobao Mall, ensuring the successful conclusion of Double 11 with a total turnover of 498.2 billion RMB (approximately 74.1 billion USD) (source: Alibaba Battle Report). In this case, Alibaba Cloud, as an infrastructure service provider, offered a combination of services such as computing, databases, auto-scaling, storage, CDN, etc., and successfully supported a grand festival with billions of transactions, showcasing the cloud power of Alibaba Cloud to the world.

To analyze this Asian cloud dark horse, we can explore the reasons for its rise from multiple perspectives. This article will provide you with insights into Alibaba Cloud's system infrastructure and its cloud development strategies, analyzing how its robust cloud infrastructure serves users and contributes to the remarkable performance of Taobao Mall's Double 11 event.

Alibaba Cloud System Analysis

When it comes to Alibaba Cloud computing, let's first take a look at the current distribution of Alibaba Cloud data centers. According to official data (as of July 1, 2021), there are currently 12 international Alibaba Cloud regions, comprising a total of 26 availability zones (AZs); there are also 12 regions in China, including 49 AZs.

（Source：Alibaba Website）

The major contributor to Alibaba Cloud's emergence as a cloud dark horse is the independently developed "Apsara" system by the Alibaba Cloud team, as shown below:

（Source：Alibaba Academy）

The Apsara system primarily serves as the underlying management and operating system for Alibaba Cloud, which is further divided into several subsystems: including the Pangu system for distributed data storage, the Fuxi system dedicated to resource scheduling, and the Shennong system for monitoring clusters. Currently, Alibaba Cloud runs tasks, maintains, and reasonably schedules resources using the aforementioned system.

Having discussed Alibaba Cloud's system foundation, let's talk about how Alibaba Cloud provides its practical services through the Apsara system. Below are brief introductions to the Alibaba Cloud services that supported the Double 11 event, while detailed technical details and product introductions can be found in other articles by Haier Cloud Architects.

ECS (Elastic Compute Service)

Concept: A representative service of Alibaba Cloud computing, comparable to GCS of GCP and EC2 of AWS, providing the most basic cloud computing resources. Additionally, it integrates Alibaba Cloud's Auto Scaling service to maintain the scalability of machine services.

ACK (Alibaba Container Service for Kubernetes)

Concept: Integrating the characteristics of the open-source software K8S and combining them with Alibaba Cloud's other services, including scalability, security, storage, and networking services, provided to users. During the 2020 Double 11 event, nearly 80% of core business was deployed on ACK, which could expand to nearly a million containers within an hour to meet demand.

PolarDB

Concept: PolarDB is Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native database solution, supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle DB. The birth of PolarDB was due to the long-term use of Oracle's database technology by Alibaba Cloud in the past. However, as the times evolved, the original database was insufficient for modern high-concurrency, short-time processing of large QPS, and rapid horizontal scaling requirements. At the same time, enterprises also had to bear high software licensing fees. Therefore, based on the above characteristics, the Alibaba Cloud team created a complete cloud-native database system, namely PolarDB.

This database system was also the unsung hero behind the Double 11 event of Taobao, having processed 1 billion order requests within 24 hours. By combining with Alibaba Cloud's other services, PolarDB demonstrated its high capacity, scalability, and flexibility. With Alibaba Cloud's massive hardware resources supply and the "Apsara" core scheduling system, combined with ECS, ACK, Auto Scaling, PolarDB, and cross-node disaster recovery solutions, the 2020 Taobao Double 11 event concluded successfully, with excellent user experience throughout the process.

Many factors combined have enabled Alibaba Cloud to surpass other public clouds in the IaaS field, achieving the honor of being the first in the Asian IaaS cloud market share and the third in the global IaaS cloud market share.

Furthermore, in 2021, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled a groundbreaking technology called "One Cloud, Multiple Cores." In the future, the Apsara system will be able to integrate different chips, including Arm, RISC-V, x86, etc., assisting users in using a single cloud and meeting various computational needs, thereby making Alibaba Cloud's computing technology more robust. Let's look forward to what exciting innovations Alibaba Cloud will bring in the future!