Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud business of Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce company. It was set up in Hangzhou in 2009 to run Alibaba's own growing workloads on Apsara, a distributed operating system written in-house, and it now sells the same infrastructure to other companies. It is one of the largest clouds in Asia and operates 107 availability zones in 31 regions around the world.

For a business with customers in China and Southeast Asia, Alibaba Cloud is often the most practical choice, and its Qwen family of AI models has drawn developers from elsewhere too.

Key features

• Elastic Compute Service (ECS). Virtual servers in many sizes, including GPU instances, plus simple application servers for small sites.
• Object Storage Service (OSS). Scalable object storage for media, backups and data lakes.
• ApsaraDB. Managed databases, including ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server.
• Function Compute. A pay-as-you-go serverless platform that scales functions automatically.
• Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK). Managed Kubernetes clusters.
• Edge Security Acceleration. Content delivery combined with edge protection, with an always-free entry tier.
• Model Studio. Access to Qwen and other models for building AI applications.
• Automation. The Alibaba Cloud CLI, APIs and an official Terraform provider.

Who it is for

Alibaba Cloud suits companies that serve users in mainland China or across Asia, developers building on Qwen models, and enterprises that want a large provider with a strong presence in the region. Small teams working only in Europe or North America may find the console and documentation less familiar than those of the US clouds.

Pricing at a glance

Products are billed separately. ECS can be paid by monthly or yearly subscription, pay-as-you-go, preemptible instances or savings plans, and Function Compute is pay-as-you-go. New users can claim free trials, including USD 90 of ECS credit valid for three months, 500 GB of OSS for one month and a one-month ApsaraDB RDS trial, and some products, such as the Edge Security Acceleration entry tier, are always free. Prices as checked on 10 October 2026; confirm on the vendor's pricing page.

Things to consider

• Two separate sites. The international service at alibabacloud.com and the mainland China service are run as separate platforms with their own accounts.
• Regulation and data location. Check where your data will be stored and what rules apply, especially for regions in mainland China.
• Trial terms differ by product. Each free offer has its own length and limits, and some are only for new users.
• Large catalogue. Many product names and options take time to learn.

Getting started

1. Compare products on the pricing page and register for an international account.
2. Claim the free trials that fit your project, starting with the ECS credit.
3. Choose a region close to your users and launch an ECS instance or ACK cluster.
4. Add OSS storage or a managed database, using the documentation.