Alibaba Cloud has recently announced a significant reduction in prices for its international user base, extending discounts on its core compute, storage, and database services that were previously offered to its Chinese customers earlier in the year. The initiative, unveiled in January 2024, saw Alibaba Cloud slashing prices for users who committed to long-term contracts. Now, these cost-saving measures are being extended to international users, with discounts applied to pay-as-you-go usage models.
While detailed information regarding specific instance types covered by these discounts was not provided, Alibaba has disclosed that discounts ranging from 30 to 59 percent have been implemented on its Elastic Compute Service, a core component of its cloud infrastructure. Additionally, Alibaba Cloud has tailored specific reductions for its Object Storage Service (OSS) resource plans, exemplified by the one-year 500 GB package, which has seen a price drop from $63 to $16.99.
In addition to price reductions, Alibaba Cloud has enhanced its free data transfer allowance from 20 to 200 GB, encompassing data transfers within the cloud. However, egress allowances are excluded from this offer.
Beyond price adjustments, Alibaba Cloud has introduced new products aimed at facilitating the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. One such offering is a service designed to manage the integration and operation of large language models (LLMs) across model architecture and cloud environments. Another product, the PAI-Lingjun Intelligent Computing Service, serves as an AI computing platform tailored for foundation model training, inference, and high-performance computing tasks. This service, currently available in Singapore, boasts impressive capabilities, supporting up to 100,000 cards in a single training cluster, with minimal latency of 1.5 microseconds and a maximum throughput of 20 TB.
Moreover, Alibaba Cloud has introduced an energy expert tool designed to calculate carbon footprints and monitor and forecast energy consumption, catering to sustainability concerns.
These new services will leverage Alibaba Cloud’s eighth-gen Elastic Compute Services (ECS) infrastructure, which promises a 60 percent increase in computing power per unit. The company has also upgraded its eRDMA network to reduce latency to as low as 8 microseconds in certain scenarios. Additionally, the adoption of NVMe SSDs has led to a 15 to 20 percent reduction in IO latency, further enhancing performance.
While Alibaba Cloud’s initiatives are commendable, their reception among users remains uncertain, especially given concerns over data security and privacy. Governments are closely scrutinizing Chinese technology services due to national security laws that could grant authorities access to customer data. Similarly, other nations have also implemented regulatory measures to oversee data activities, highlighting the complex landscape faced by cloud service providers in terms of compliance and trust-building efforts.