AWS vs. Alibaba — Round 1: Southeast Asia

AWS seems to be taking its battles wisely, and although Alibaba in China faces a number of disadvantages, Singapore is a different story. In addition to being named the most favorable country in the business world for several years, Singapore's Internet economy is expected to reach $ 200 billion by 2025. This will be an interesting combination because Alibaba has a large influence in the region, Singapore is not China, and if AWS is looking for a fair fight, this is definitely the place for that, so this seems to be the site of the first round of the AWS against Alibaba Cloud Wars.

The fight begins

The way the world giants exercise their weight strategically is almost like seeing "Game of Thrones", except that the "armies" here are made up of a lot of money. Speaking of a lot of money, Alibaba is injecting another billion dollars to increase its stake in Lazada, its latest acquisition. Lazada itself was the first billion-dollar acquisition in Southeast Asia and has since established a trade and logistics center in Malaysia's free digital trading zone and has doubled its data capacity in Hong Kong. The "History of Singapore" here is that Amazon has landed with Prime and has made all retail industries in the logistics of financial services throughout the region expect to experience a major commotion.

While the acquisition of Lazada and the launch of Amazon Prime have nothing to do with cloud computing, e-commerce is still a different battle from the same war as the cloud. The fact that both companies make their "bread and butter" mainly through e-commerce is just one of the striking similarities between the two companies, and many people think that the battle between Amazon Prime vs. Lazada in Singapore is just an "exhibition party" before the real war for dominance of the international cloud: AWS against Alibaba

AWS vs. Alibaba: King Kong Vs. Godzilla?

Earlier this year, Lazado CEO Maximilian Bittner explained that Amazon was not worried about saying, "It's very difficult for me to worry about someone who has not yet entered the market. they are here now and since there is a $ 250 billion gorilla behind him, the $ 400 billion gorilla in front of him probably does not look scary.

However, from the point of view of a computer director, especially in Southeast Asia, choosing between the two may not be as simple as choosing to buy Cheese and Chocolate Woody Prime or Lazada. Cloud providers offer different pricing models, unique upgrade options, frequent price reductions, different services and different billing styles. To increase confusion, customers' opinions vary according to their personal experience, which is always unique.

Cheaper by a dozen

If we have to generalize, prices and latency will be above any list of users in AWS vs.. Alibaba, and with respect to both, AWS seems to have the advantage. AWS has reduced its rates approximately 52 times so far, with current rates accounting for about half of those charged by the smaller clouds. In addition, Amazon has approximately five times the capacity of the next 14 largest competitors, so Alibaba Cloud will not win this war. Curiously, a recent Financial Times report indicates that Alibaba has "halved" its base prices.

Alibaba has three different price options to choose from, the base is $ 7.49 per month and comes with 1 core, 1 GB of memory and 40 GB of hard drive space. A similar AWS configuration costs about $ 9.50 a month on average, although all calculations are depleted when it increases or decreases. This is probably the reason why customer feedback indicates that there have been cases where Alibaba Cloud was more expensive than AWS

AWS posted

Another implication of the "cloud" of the Amazon Prime launch in Singapore is that it is essentially an AWS cloud ecosystem advertising for the entire region. From now on, millions of customers from Southeast Asian companies will see a concrete example of how a customer-obsessed business works with AWS cloud infrastructure and an ecosystem of powerful tools and services. both open source and custom. It is also speculated that AWS is an important customer for many cloud providers, data and analysis, which will accelerate the entry of these players in this region.

The above statement is funny, it's the ego

Following AWS, Google Compute Engine also moves to per-second billing

A week ago, AWS announced that it would rapidly change billing per second for users of its EC2 service. This is not a big surprise, while Google today announced a very similar move.

The Google Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and Flex Engine environments will now have per-second billing, starting immediately (AWS users should wait until October 2). This new pricing system extends to preferred virtual machines and machines running high-end operating systems such as Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server. With this, AWS, which offers only invoicing per second for basic Linux instances and not for Windows Server and other Linux distributions on its platform, currently has a separate time load.

Like AWS, Google will charge for at least one minute.

Interestingly, Google has already introduced billing per second for its persistent disks, compromised GPUs and discounts.

While Google contends that for most use cases, billing per second will result in very small billing changes, the company also notes that there are many applications where the level up and down has a lot of meaning (websites, mobile apps and data processing jobs, for example).

"This is probably the reason why we have not heard many customers asking per second," said Paul Nash, Group Product Manager for Compute Engine, in today's announcement. "But we do not want you to choose between your morning coffee and your basic hours, so we're happy to bring billing per second to your virtual machines with a minimum of one minute."

Thus, while Google is not revealed at this time, this is clearly a reaction to the evolution of Amazon, although the company considers it as another box in a comparison of features between the two services in the cloud.

What about Microsoft?

So far, Microsoft has not made a similar move. "With Azure Container Instances, we paved the way for billing per second, with a service that runs in seconds and takes seconds, we realized that it was incredibly critical to give customers that granularity of costs," said Corey Sanders , Microsoft's Product Manager for Azure Compute, told me at the Microsoft Ignite conference when I asked him about his company's plans. "I look forward to seeing other clouds continue and to offer customers the best flexibility for their pricing."

As for regular virtual machines, Sanders remained in the message and noted that Microsoft wanted to focus on the containers because that is where billing per second is the most logical. "We are always looking to improve the billing constructions in our platform and make it more agile and more agile for our customers," he said. I would be very surprised if Microsoft did not try to verify invoicing per second in the near future.