Clouds in China

ChinaNetCloud – Clouds in China2
Table of Contents
Overview..................................................................................................... 4
ChinaNetCloud ............................................................................................................. 5
China Cloud Overview .............................................................................. 6
SaaS............................................................................................................................. 6
PaaS............................................................................................................................. 7
IaaS .............................................................................................................................. 7
History of Chinese Clouds ............................................................................................ 8
Chinese Public Clouds.............................................................................. 9
Aliyun............................................................................................................................ 9
Q-Cloud ...................................................................................................................... 11
UCloud........................................................................................................................ 12
QingCloud................................................................................................................... 13
(ChinaC) HuaYun ....................................................................................................... 14
ChinaCache................................................................................................................ 15
Huawei Cloud ............................................................................................................. 16
ViaCloud ..................................................................................................................... 17
Shanda Grand Cloud.................................................................................................. 18
Sina Cloud .................................................................................................................. 19
Jinshan / KS Yun Cloud.............................................................................................. 20
StdYun Cloud ............................................................................................................. 21
Baidu Cloud ................................................................................................................ 22
JingDong Cloud .......................................................................................................... 23
International Public Clouds .................................................................... 24
Amazon Web Services ............................................................................................... 24
Microsoft Azure........................................................................................................... 25
Historical Public Clouds ......................................................................... 26
CloudEx ...................................................................................................................... 26
Joyent ......................................................................................................................... 26
Hi-China...................................................................................................................... 26
Cloud Storage .......................................................................................... 27
Qiniu ........................................................................................................................... 27
Upyun ......................................................................................................................... 27

ChinaNetCloud – Clouds in China 3
Private Clouds ......................................................................................... 28
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+...................................................................................... 28
OpenStack.................................................................................................................. 29
ChinaNetCloud ........................................................................................................... 29
Cloud Feature Matrix............................................................................... 30
China Cloud Challenges ......................................................................... 31
Post-Pay ..................................................................................................................... 31
Minimum Time Period / Flexibility / Contract .............................................................. 32
Technology & Feature Limits...................................................................................... 33
Reliability .................................................................................................................... 34
Security....................................................................................................................... 34
Bandwidth................................................................................................................... 35
Connectivity & CDNs .................................................................................................. 36
Summary .................................................................................................. 37
About ChinaNetCloud ............................................................................. 38

Overview
China is currently home to the world's largest Internet user
population, with over 650 million mostly young, urban users
with discretionary income to spend. They have iPhones, play
games, buy things, watch videos, write microblogs, and
connect with friends from allover. As a result, they are the
very face of the future of the Internet, in China and beyond.
Thus, more and more large-scale Internet sites, games, apps,
and services are springing up to serve the needs of the
people. While these are strongly local in nature, there are also
an increasing number of Western and Global brands with a
strong presence in the e-commerce, gaming, and mobile
sectors, among others. Meanwhile, the number of sites and
systems grow day by day as both local and global companies
race to take advantage of the growing market.
As in the West, all of these sites and systems have historically
been based on physical servers in traditional Internet Data
Centers (IDCs). It was and still is common to see increasingly
large data centers being built or operated by companies such
as 21ViaNet or ChinaNetCenter, and populated by row-upon-
row of Dell servers.
Yet as we approach the midpoint of this decade, the use of
traditional IDCs is slowly changing as the 'cloud' increasingly
comes to China. Domestic and a few hardy International
players are rapidly building and promoting their systems to a
somewhat skeptical market. They are slowly gaining
popularity, much like the last decade in the West where
clouds rose to take over the physical market.
In particular, international companies to include Amazon
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM are now in China; alongside
are domestic companies such as Aliyun, QCloud, UCloud,
ChinaCache, QingCloud, HuaCloud, ViaCloud, and several
more. It is getting to be a busy place with lots of different
clouds targeting a variety of markets and utilizing a myriad of
technologies and strategies.

This guide helps describe and sort out what the different clouds
are, their common and distinct features, and which workloads
make sense to run where. Also, when it is best to skip the
public clouds altogether to run on physical servers, private
clouds, or even hybrid systems.
ChinaNetCloud
ChinaNetCloud can help you understand the world of Chinese
clouds; after all, it is in our name. As China's leading Internet
Server Management company and a world-class managed
service provider, we are the experts on all aspects of Chinese
Internet operations, and we are partners of all the key cloud
providers, especially Aliyun, AWS, and ChinaCache.
We routinely help companies of all nationalities, types, and
sizes to design, build, and operate large-scale cloud-based
systems that are able to successfully reach hundreds of millions
of Chinese users, every day.
This brochure describes the Chinese Public Cloud situation, its
structure and challenges, and how to succeed on and with the
clouds in the world's most populous country.

China Cloud Overview
China has an interesting Internet architecture and
infrastructure situation; in most ways, it is just like the U.S. or
any other large country or region. However, in other ways it is
quite different with some surprising distinctions and
challenges that can trip up the newcomer, both local and
foreign. Furthermore, there is a greater diversity of quality,
pricing, and service levels than is commonly found in the
West.
Public Clouds are an increasingly important part of China's
Internet infrastructure, though most are new and still quite
limited in comparison to their global counterparts, they are
quickly evolving and things are changing every day.
Chinese clouds can generally be broken down along two
dimensions, the IaaS - PaaS - SaaS service type, and by size
and origin such as from small local to large international
clouds. This paper is about IaaS clouds, but the others will be
covered briefly.
SaaS
At the top of the cloud 'stack' is Software-as-a-Service. This
moniker encompasses all other online services that range
from business systems such as Salesforce, to various other
HR, ERP, and Accounting systems, among others; this also
includes personal applications such as Evernote, Dropbox,
and Pinterest.
Although in China these systems are still small, they are
growing along with the increasingly common use of
international software like Evernote, as well as lots of local
competitors. In addition, online systems for accounting,
employee management and recruiting, ERP, and many other
areas are growing rapidly. These are especially helpful in
China as most companies are just computerizing their
operations and thus have little to no existing legacy systems
that slow their move to the cloud.

Key players include Kingdee and Kingsoft, offering corporate
and personal cloud services, plus many smaller systems that
focus on enterprise users. In addition, Microsoft has recently
released their Office365 suite as part of their Azure deployment
in China.
PaaS
At the mid-layer of the cloud 'stack' is Platform-as-a-Service, a
poorly-defined area that is not clear, even in the U.S. PaaS
generally includes e-commerce platforms, payment systems,
and ready-to-use code deployment platforms such as
EngineYard or Heroku. In China, these are not yet very
common, though platforms such as Taobao and T-Mall likely
qualify in the e-commerce area.
Other services include Encoding-as-a-Service on systems such
as Qiniu, and various streaming services provided by top-tier
CDNs such as ChinaCache and ChinaNetCenter.
In addition, some global PaaS platforms such as Azure have
launched in China (Azure plays in both the IaaS and PaaS
areas). In this role, Azure allows users to deploy . NET, PHP,
and other code directly on the platform to create various
scalable environments and applications.
IaaS
By far the most common clouds in China today are of the
Infrastructure-as-a-Service variety. These systems are similar
to those in the West, though somewhat more diverse and
varied in age, development stage, quality, service, price, and
industry focus. These IaaS systems are the focus of this report.
The China IaaS market is still limited in many ways. For
example, the only cloud that offers even a simple cloud API is
Qingcloud, though still nothing like what AWS has. Advanced
features such as AutoScaling, DevOps, or even monitoring are
not yet widly available. Even AWS has only launched a modest
subset of their whole feature set in China.

History of Chinese Clouds
The history of public IaaS clouds in China is a short and
somewhat painful one, with a few challenges and failures.
Since 2008, ChinaNetCloud is proud to be the first company
to offer public cloud servers in China. It was not until 2010
when other competitors such as Aliyun and CloudEx entered
the marketplace, with the latter shutting down just a year later
due to various challenges.
Following that, HiChina (WanWang/Net.cn), who was an older
domain registrar and hosting service provider, got into the
business partly by using the Aliyun system. In 2012, Aliyun
bought HiChina and merged with them before shutting down
their service a short year later.
However, 2013 was a good year in the Chinese Cloud space
with Aliyun making a big push plus many new local players
jumping in, from JingDong to Tencent, Baidu, UCloud, and
more. Not to mention big international clouds such as
Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM entering the market, making it
truly competitive on many levels.

Chinese Public Clouds
The following is an overview of the important new and existing
Chinese public clouds, many of which either launched or grew
during the past three years. They are very diverse, ranging in
size from big to small with varying prices, quality, and services.
Aliyun
The largest and oldest local cloud, Aliyun, was founded in 2009
and has been the leading Chinese cloud for about two years.
Aliyun sees itself as the "AWS of China,” including with some
AWS-compatible APIs and product names such as RDS and
ELB. It seeks to be a utility where users can buy computing
power just like tap water or electricity.
In addition, Alibaba, Taobao, and other related services run
parts of their infrastructure on Aliyun, providing good scalability
and operational experience in very large environments. Aliyun
also has a business dedicated to providing cloud services for
the Government.
The Aliyun feature set is probably the broadest and most
advanced for local providers, including basic VMs similar to
AWS EC2, called ECS; online distributed S3-like storage, called
OSS; and RDS-like database services, called RDS for MySQL
and SQL Server. EBS-style iSCSI SAN storage is reported to
be delivered soon, as will Hadoop-oriented HBASE and Map
Reduce services.
Meanwhile, bandwidth on Aliyun is probably the best in China,
as it uses the same 8-line GBP system as Alibaba and Taobao,
coming in at about 100RMB per Mbps, which is an excellent
price. Optional integrated CDN services are also available.
Aliyun's services include some features not seen in the Global
clouds, such as a built-in security scanning service that is
similar to CloudFlare or AnQuanBao, protecting sites from
hacker problems such as XSS and SQL injection. AWS does
not even offer this feature.

Pricing on Aliyun is aggressive and has recently been
enhanced to allow per hour pricing versus the traditional
monthly scheme, and included further price cuts in 2015 as
things got more competitive.
Aliyun has some APIs, but these are focused on partners,
such as other data centers or resellers who want to provision
and bill for Aliyun automatically, as the mainstream billing
system has very limited support for proper sub-accounts and
reseller billing management. Though there is otherwise no
customer-facing API yet, other than for OSS, the S3-like
online storage, which has an S3-compatible API.
Physical data centers for Aliyun are scattered, but separated
so there is no real region or zoning. By the end of 2013, the
Hangzhou IDC was nearly full and new systems were being
provisioned in Qingdao and other areas such as Hong Kong.
Aliyun has a number of partners, including ChinaNetCloud, to
handle various deployment and services, plus an AWS-like
marketplace for related partners to sell their products and
services, including anti-virus, setup, audit/tuning, and
management services.
Heading into 2015 with AWS and many new local competitors
in the market, Aliyun has a new CEO and is focusing on
features, partnerships, promotions, and R&D for what should
be many exciting years ahead.
Name: Aliyun
Parent: Alibaba Group
Offering Clouds Since: 2009
Based in: Hangzhou
Support Languages: Chinese
Data Centers: Hanghzou, Qingdao, Beijing, Shenzhen, and
Hong Kong
More information regarding Aliyun is available at
www.AliYun.com

Q-Cloud
Tencent has recently launched its own IaaS cloud service that
is reportedly targeted at online gaming with numerous features
to support game publishers. This is in addition to its existing
consumer-oriented cloud that provides typical services such as
online storage.
Their IaaS offers common services such as VMs, DBMS and
NoSQL services, plus CDN, object storage, caching services,
and monitoring. VM Servers are available with up to 60GB of
RAM and have local RAID5 storage. Auto-Scaling, similar to
Elastic Beanstalk, is also available.
They do have some nice features such as dynamic bandwidth
allocation and pricing, along with utilization alerts that are
helpful for growing companies and surges. Their DB
performance in terms of I/O seems better than some other
clouds, as is their DB monitoring.
Another announced focus of the Q-Cloud is security and mobile
acceleration, with part of this being deployed as mobile SDKs
for developer usage. On the security side, like Aliyun, they have
automated DDoS and other attack detection and defenses,
which ideally activate within 1-2 minutes of an attack.
Q-Cloud also offers dynamic geo-DNS with their own 3-line
BGP network that includes smart best-path routing to enhance
overall delivery and performance. The network services include
HTTP optimization, page compression, resizing, and other
mobile-focused technologies.
Name: Tencent Q-Cloud
Parent: Tencent
Based in: Shenzhen
Data Centers: Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou
More information regarding Tencent Q-Cloud is available at
www.QCloud.com

UCloud
UCloud is the largest and best funded of the independent
startup clouds. Launched in 2013, UCloud has claimed to
receive US$50million in funding from Legend, DCM,
Bertelsmann, and other VCs in China. With this, they have
built out five data centers in and around China.
UCloud is offering basic VMs configured with up to 16 cores
and 64GB of RAM, plus cloud database services, cloud
storage, block storage, load balancing, caching, and
application acceleration. They do not have object storage yet,
though they partner with UpYun for object service, and
ChinaNetCenter for CDN service.
UCloud also supports workloads outside of Mainland China,
with a new facility in Hong Kong for International and Chinese
companies focused on Asian or global markets.
Name: UCloud
Parent: UCloud
Based in: Shanghai
Data Centers: Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Zhejiang,
Guanzhou, and North America
More information regarding UCloud is available at
www.UCloud.cn

QingCloud
QingCloud is another recently started and well-funded
independent startup cloud. Launched in 2013 by ex-IBM
engineers, QingCloud is focused on the high-end market with
performance and technical excellence as key goals. QingCloud
has recently received funding from LightSpeed, Matrix,
BlueRun, and other VCs in China.
QingCloud is offering basic VMs configured with high-
performance disk subsystems, though its system is under rapid
development with a new API and other more advanced
features. They also charge by the second for ultimate timing
and temporary use flexibility.
QingCloud has mentioned future support for workloads outside
of Mainland China, in Hong Kong and/or the USA.
Name: QingCloud
Based in: Beijing
Data Centers: Beijing, Guangdong, and Hong Kong
More information regarding QingCloud is available at
www.QingCloud.com

(ChinaC) HuaYun
HuaYun is the third of the well-funded local startup clouds.
Using the English name ChinaC, and HuaYun in Chinese,
they have their roots in the local data center industry. Funded
by Intel and other VCs with a reported US$50 million, Huayun
claims to be the largest of the independent cloud startups in
China.
They offer basic VMs along with various PaaS Services.
Name: HuaYun (ChinaC)
Offering Clouds Since: 2012-2013
Based in: Wuxi
Data Centers: With partners in over 20 cities
More information regarding HuaYun is available at
www.ChinaC.com

ChinaCache
For several years, ChinaCache has been China's largest CDN,
offering public cloud infrastructure based on proprietary
systems. However, in 2014 they migrated to OpenStack, which
will make them the largest OpenStack system in China,
enabling them to offer features and services from the global
OpenStack developer community.
In addition, having a public OpenStack cloud will allow
seamless integration of hybrid clouds for larger on-site private
clouds that customers may have. This combined cloud model,
similar to what Rackspace offers outside of China, should be
very popular with larger companies and systems.
Based on OpenStack, ChinaCache will at least be offering VMs,
object stores, block stores, private networking/VPC, image
stores (AMI), firewalls, and possibly RDS-like database and
caching services. As China's largest CDN, they will of course
offer CDNs, too.
Name: ChinaCache Cloud
Parent: ChinaCache
Based in: Beijing
Data Centers: Beijing, Hong Kong, and the United States
More information regarding ChinaCache is located at
www.ChinaCache.com

Huawei Cloud
Electronics giant Huawei has had their own cloud for some
time, but with limited public exposure and use. Huawei's cloud
is moving towards OpenStack, and has joined the OpenStack
Foundation as a Gold Member.
Their announced focus is on Telcos and emerging markets,
and their cloud includes enterprise services such as remote
desktop, all of which make sense given their parent
company's traditional customer base, including a focus on
security and firewalls.
Huawei is also one of the only local clouds that has
Availability Zones, where customers can run servers in
multiple, independent locations for additional overall reliability.
In addition, the use of OpenStack allows support of hybrid
clouds, and they've mentioned leveraging older hardware via
private clouds that can then connect with their public cloud.
Name: Huawei Cloud
Parent: Huawei
Based in: Beijing
Data Centers: Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen
More information regarding Huawei Cloud is available at
www.HuaWei.com

ViaCloud
Operated as a subsidiary of 21Vianet Shanghai, ViaCloud
should not be confused with the 21Vianet in Beijing. This is
easily done, as there are two 21Vianets, the big public one in
Beijing, and a smaller one in Shanghai that split off many years
ago. Today, the two have no relationship, though Josh Chen,
CEO of 21Vianet Beijing, still owns shares in 21Vianet
Shanghai. This cloud is part of the Shanghai-based company.
ViaCloud previously offered a proprietary cloud for two years
before it moved to the OpenStack platform in late 2013, based
on the Grizzly release. Its current market focus is on building
hybrid clouds for medium enterprises, so it can offer services
ranging from Managed Private Clouds on Premise, Hosted
Private Clouds, Virtual Private Clouds, and Public Clouds.
ViaCloud reports that their cloud platform has a standard SLA
and is ISO 27001 certified, with over a thousand enterprise
customers. Interestingly, ViaCloud’s OpenStack platform is
partially built and supported by 99cloud, a leading OpenStack
system integrator and technology provider in China. The two
companies are very active in the Chinese OpenStack
community.
Name: ViaCloud
Parent: 21ViaNet Shanghai
Based in: Shanghai
Data Centers: Shanghai
More information regarding ViaCloud is available at
www.ViaCloud.com.cn

Shanda Grand Cloud
Shanda, the online Chinese gaming giant, has had its own
public cloud since 2011, though it is not well known nor
heavily used. Service offerings include VMs, cloud storage,
disk storage, media delivery, and database clouds, along with
security scanning and system monitoring. Grand Cloud also
offers a PaaS service, for PHP, Ruby, Java, and Python, with
auto-scaling. Shanda's original CEO came from AWS, where
he worked on S3.
The Grand Cloud has been challenged in part due to its poor
connectivity, with only a single line to China Telecom, and
thus potentially poor performance to northern China. In
addition, management changes including the CEO's departure
in late 2012 created stability and go-to-market concerns.
In 2013 there appears to be a new northern node with BGP
service, though the number of connected BGP carriers is not
clear, but it would normally be 2, 3, 4, or 8. EBS services are
available, along with database services such MongoDB-as-a-
service, and load balancing. In addition, Ku6 provides video
hosting, transcoding, and streaming services, along with push
notification services for various mobile devices.
Name: Grand Cloud
Parent: Shanda
Based in: Shanghai
Data Centers: Shanghai and Beijing
More information regarding Grand Cloud is available at
www.GrandCloud.cn

Sina Cloud
Sina, the Chinese online media company whose websites
include Weibo, also has a public cloud; however it is not well
known, in part because it is not a typical IaaS cloud.
In general, Sina Cloud appears more focused on application
stores, a PaaS cloud engine, and an enterprise version of the
cloud engine, much like Google's App Engine. Essentially
everything seems to be a service, somewhat like AWS and
others' RDS with MySQL, Memcache, storage, etc., as-a-
service, yet without any actual customer-facing VMs.
Name: Sina Cloud
Parent: Sina
Based in: Beijing
Data Centers: China
More information regarding Sina Cloud is available at
www.SinaCloud.com

Jinshan / KS Yun Cloud
The Jinshan / KS Yun Cloud is smaller and newer than most,
supporting CentOS, Ubuntu, and Debian systems at the VM
level, while offering configurations of up to 16 cores and 64
GB of RAM.
Disks are limited to local disks, in either rotating or SSD
options for performance. They also offer RDS, structured
storage, caching, and load balancing. Furthermore, Kingsoft
Standard Storage Service, known as KS3, is similar in
function to Amazon’s S3 service.
In March of 2014, KS Yun announced their intentions to enter
the Game Cloud market. Later on December 3rd
, 2014, Xiao
Mi announced a $1 billion investment in KS Yun over the next
three to five years.
Name: Jinshan Cloud
Parent: KingSoft
Based in: Beijing
Data Centers: China
More information regarding KS Yun is available at
www.KSYun.com

StdYun Cloud
StdYun is a newer and smaller cloud, on which limited
information is available. VMs are available by the hour, which is
unusual in China. StdYun also allows hybrid models where
customers seem able to put their own hardware into the data
center.
Application installation and configuration is provided at no cost
to customers, although the level of this and ongoing support is
not clear. This cloud is Linux only, with no Windows support
available.
Name: StdCloud
Parent: StdCloud
Based in: Beijing
Data Centers: China
More information regarding StdYun is available at!
www.StdYun.com

Baidu Cloud
Famous Chinese search engine Baidu has two cloud
offerings, a consumer-facing system with services more like
online storage, messaging, phone backup, etc., as well as a
developer-facing PaaS system.
The PaaS system is similar to Google's App Engine, and
supports PHP, Java, Python, and Node.js. Storage and other
services are used via RESTful API and SDK tools. A variety of
services are available including notifications, SMS, video
services, and load balancing, along with cloud DB support for
MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis.
Name: Baidu Cloud
Parent: Baidu
Based in: Beijing
Data Centers: Beijing
More information regarding Baidu Cloud is available at
yun.Baidu.com and developer.Baidu.com

JingDong Cloud
Formerly known as 360Buy.com, JingDong Cloud is currently
following a path somewhat similar to what Amazon did many
years ago. It is primary an in-house cloud for internal use, but it
is also offered to select partners and related sites in the e-
commerce world.!
JingDong Cloud has many brand names for its services,
including YunDing, YunFeng, Tripod, and JCloud, the JingDong
Cloud Engine.
The Tripod service is for IaaS including VMs, EBS storage,
auto-scaling, RDS DBs, monitoring, and security for DDoS plus
vulnerability scanning, but this system is still in testing and is
open on a limited basis.
Generally, none of these services appear to be commercially
available to non-related Internet companies.
Name: JingDong Cloud
Parent: JingDong (360 Buy)
Based in: Beijing
Data Centers: Beijing
More information regarding JingDong Cloud is available at
appengine.JD.com

International Public Clouds
Amazon Web Services
AWS announced at the end of 2013 that they would start
providing their public cloud in China in early 2014, though this
has been delayed until at least early 2015. ChinaNetCenter
and SINNET, both in Beijing, currently support their service.
Their list of AWS features for China is quite long and covers
most key elements used by customers, though their local
CDN strategy and delivery is not year clear. In addition, key
issues like ICP licenses and RMB fapiao also remain unclear.
Amazon's security and interoperability with other regions is
unclear, though they have announced separate credentials
will be needed in China vs. the global systems. How inter-
region migrations, AMI transfers, RDS replication, and other
global features will work in this structure is also unclear.
Customers should probably plan on having a totally separate
system in China with very limited sharing and interoperability,
at least initially.
AWS has hired a sizable sales, operations, and support team
in China and is actively selling, plus working with key partners
such as ChinaNetCloud, to build an ecosystem that includes
consulting, operations, and managed services partners, both
local and international.
ChinaNetCloud already offers Managed Services on AWS,
both in China and globally. As a global AWS reseller and
Advanced partner, ChinaNetCloud can offer discounts and
one-stop service outside of China.
Pricing is rumored to be higher in China than in other regions.
More information regarding AWS is available at
www.AmazonAWS.cn!

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft was the first major international cloud to enter China,
coming in 2013 via a partnership with leading private IDC
provider 21ViaNet and also the Shanghai Government who
supplied capital and facilities.
Historically focused on Windows OS and products, Azure also
supports Linux and more typical Internet applications.
Additionally, Office 365 is being offered in China, presumably
helping combat piracy among Windows and Microsoft Office
users by offering convenient and inexpensive online solutions,
especially for small and medium businesses.
Azure's security and interoperability relationship with other
global regions remains unclear.
More information regarding Microsoft Azure is available at
www.WindowsAzure.cn
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Historical Public Clouds
Public clouds in China are quite new, but already there have
been several that have failed, been bought, or otherwise
shutdown.
CloudEx
Originally part of 21ViaNet, CloudEx was the earliest
significant public cloud in China, offering virtual machines in
late 2009 based on homegrown infrastructure. Unfortunately
CloudEx was shutdown in 2011 due to internal management
challenges. There are rumors the system was eventually sold
to Huawei in 2012 or 2013.
Joyent
American cloud pioneer Joyent entered China to offer their
public cloud system in 2010, though they were never officially
licensed and struggled to both sell and deliver their service,
eventually leaving China later that year.
Hi-China
One of China's largest domain registrars and hosting services,
Hi-China, also known as Net.cn and WanWang, launched
their public clouds alongside their traditional VPS and hosting
services in about 2011. Hi-China was purchased in 2012 by
Aliyun and ceased public cloud services in 2013.
!

Cloud Storage
In addition to typical cloud services, China also has a number of
B2B cloud services, typically for object storage or transcoding
services. !
Qiniu
Qiniu is primarily an object storage service, similar to Amazon
S3, storing each object in several data centers, with various
security and permission levels.
The service includes a typical download CDN utilizing over 500
nodes, but also an optional upload CDN that helps end users
upload larger files, including temporary storage and forward
functions. This can be especially useful for faster uploads of
sizable raw video or audio files.
Another Qiniu service is transcoding, often coupled with the
upload CDN, to provide multi-format and resolution conversions
that are often useful to media and social sites.
More information regarding Qiniu is available at www.Qiniu.com
Upyun
Upyun is an object storage system that also includes a CDN
and transcoding service. Their pricing is geared more towards
startups and, unusual for China, is based on total data
transferred, not bandwidth.
The Upyun system also includes uploading CDN support and
four-line service including Mobile and CERNET. Additionally,
strong security and other measures are available for anti-
linking, advertising, and user-agent-specific functionality.
More information regarding Upyun is available at
www.Upyun.com

Private Clouds
In addition to the public clouds in China, there are a variety of
private clouds and management services available in China.
While public clouds are getting significant attention, as is seen
outside China; activity and interest in Private Clouds by larger
companies and more complex system operators is increasing
rapidly.
Private Clouds are defined as any dedicated environment,
where a number of powerful physical servers are purchased
and virtualized into several, dozens, or even hundreds of VMs
to run load balancers, web servers, app servers, caches,
databases, file servers, and more. !
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+
IBM recently announced they are entering China with their
managed cloud offerings named SmartCloud Enterprise+
(SCE+). This system, like Microsoft’s, is delivered by
partnering with 21ViaNet. Based on OpenStack, SCE+
appears to be primarily focused on private clouds, similar to
Rackspace's Private Cloud offering, though it is more targeted
at enterprise customers.
IBM will likely do very well with their traditional enterprise,
SoE, and related government customers who need guidance
and technology as they move into the 21st century.!

OpenStack
The OpenStack system, originally sponsored by Rackspace
and NASA, is the most popular open source cloud system, and
is now being rolled out in numerous private and public services.
Some Chinese clouds such as ViaCloud are already offering
OpenStack-based public clouds, with more expected in 2015.
IBM is also offering their enterprise cloud based on OpenStack,
see above.
For Private Clouds, OpenStack supports all of the common
features commonly found in public clouds including object and
block storage, image management, networking,
chargebacks/billing, and more. In particular, OpenStack is
geared towards hybrid and federated clouds, where workloads
can be moved from private to public clouds, or from private to
private in a variety of structures and environments.
In addition to the big international OpenStack distributions,
there are a few local Chinese vendors who are working on their
own distributions, often along with consulting or implementation
services offered alongside to help companies get up and
running.
ChinaNetCloud
We have been building private clouds for many years, usually
on fairly simple Xen-based platforms. In 2015, we will be
expanding this service into larger OpenStack-based clouds,
including hybrids, as well as partnerships with key OpenStack
contributors. Most larger private clouds in the Internet space will
migrate to OpenStack over time, starting in 2015.

Cloud Feature Matrix
Cloud Feature Matrix

China Cloud Challenges
Clouds in China face a number of challenges on many levels,
from physical infrastructure, to billing, technology, and even
regulatory issues. In addition, ChinaNetCloud has a 100+ point
checklist and survey to help rate and understand different
public cloud services and their functions, processes, billings,
and limitations. Contact us for more information on this
checklist and our results and recommendations for specific
clouds. However, we have outlined a few key issues to keep in
mind when considering a cloud platform.
Post-Pay
Payment method is a big difference between clouds in China
vs. the rest of the world. Clouds outside of China typically use
credit card billing for most customers, with in-arrears invoicing
usually available for larger customers.
Meanwhile in China, virtually everything is pre-pay primarily to
avoid significant credit risk and also because credit cards are
not very common. The problem is that most clouds are at least
partially on-demand, and therefore it is very difficult to know the
cost in advance.
Thus customers typically pre-pay or fill an account in advance,
and then use that to purchase cloud services, drawing down
their account as they go, and then re-filling. This process is very
much like a pre-paid mobile phone card.
Pre-pay makes is important for customers to closely monitor
their accounts and refill them, especially for monthly services
and variable-use elements such as cloud storage. It is quite
easy to run out of money and get shutdown accidentally due to
low funds. In addition, renewal and refill reminders often go to
personal emails or old mobile SMS, creating problems when
employees leave or change mobile phone providers, both of
which are very common in China.

Furthermore, pre-pay coupled to Chinese bandwidth billing
means fixed speed bandwidth, not the more common transfer
amount used internationally, though some clouds have
additional options. Regardless, this often causes sites to hit
their bandwidth caps and have to add additional funds to solve
the problem, which can be a time-consuming process.!
Minimum Time Period / Flexibility /
Contract
Chinese clouds are typically much less flexible and on-demand
as commonly seen with international clouds. For example,
many clouds require servers to be purchased for a month at a
time, not the per-minute scheme that is typically seen on AWS.
This makes it much harder to build or use quick test or
development servers, or for troubleshooting and other
innovation-related trials. Some clouds like Aliyun have recently
improved their offerings to be per-hour and others such as
QingCloud are doing even shorter billing times down to the
second, but this still limits flexibility and complicates a number
of common practices.
In addition, most clouds need a contract of some type, though
some like Aliyun allow this to be done online. Signed contracts
along with the need for printed receipts with legal company
names tend to slow down the initial startup time.
Finally, website registration, known as ICP in China,
complicates cloud offerings. ICP filings and licenses are a
complex area, but always include sending business licenses,
domain ownership information, and other records to the
registration office, not to mention having to appear in person to
finalize the process. With far-away cloud systems that may not
be located in a company's home city, this can be burdensome
and needs to be planned in advance.

Technology & Feature Limits
Local clouds are all quite new, and tend to have a variety of
technical limitations that potential customers need to be aware
of, especially if they are more familiar with the international
clouds' more advanced technology and services. Like any cloud
whether they are local or international, each has its own
limitations and restrictions.
The most common limitation of clouds is just that they are too
simple, i.e. their services are very basic, perhaps without
enough features to be useful or suitable to more complex or
demanding cloud applications. They might be just virtual
machines and really nothing more.
The most common limit for both local and international clouds is
storage, particularly block-attached storage, which is what AWS
calls EBS. This very useful feature allows very for flexible disk
systems, including powerful tradeoffs between size, I/O
performance, and cost. This includes the key ability to resize or
expand disks as they get full.
Few local clouds offer block storage, instead using the more
common fixed disk size, and often as a single disk, with limited
I/O performance and no ability to change sizes. For those
clouds that do offer block storage, performance can be a
problem as they are not yet very optimized, especially for
demanding applications such as database servers. This should
be improving going into 2015 with new block storage features
being released.
Each of these challenges can cause problems for scaling large
Internet systems. Some clouds even have fixed, non-
upgradeable instance sizes; meaning that if customers outgrow
an instance then they must rebuild it from scratch.
Another common limit is the diversity of OS versions and
images available for use. Most clouds have a small number of
common Windows, Centos 5/6, and Ubuntu images available,
but often little or nothing else. In particular, there are no options
for pre-built images that could include more or fewer standard
packages, nor any way to include or bundle specific tools,
services, or applications.

Reliability
Some clouds have better or worse reputations for reliability,
though most are offering 3-4 9's of availability with 99.95%
being common. Only AWS has a multi-availability zone service,
but this type of advanced high-availability is very limited even
outside of China.
Security
Clouds in China have a good reputation for security; there have
been no significant incidents or breeches. However, some have
better security tools and practices than others.
Many issue simple root users and passwords that are sent by
email upon instance creation, without even the need to change
that password. Few, if any, have additional protection such as
mandatory keys, alternative users, or mandatory password
management.
Another security dimension is firewall protection for the system.
Several clouds offer this service, which is usually done as
simple source IP blocks and ports. Customers are well advised
to run iptables and other local tools on all of these clouds.!
Finally, several Chinese clouds have additional security
scanning support, much like the CloudFlare or AnQuanBao
services. These services are rarely seen outside China and
none of the three global clouds offer them anywhere. However,
they do seem quite useful and are powerful protection tools,
especially for poorly or quickly written web applications which
may be vulnerable to common attack vectors such as XSS and
SQL injection.

Bandwidth
Virtually all Chinese data centers and clouds structure
bandwidth options by port speed, and not by the more typical
total data transferred as seen in the rest of the world. This has
a variety of implications for clouds.
Port speed provisioning fixes the price in advance and thus
supports pre-payment, as mentioned above. However, since
the port speed is fixed, it is very hard to know in advance how
much is needed, especially for Internet applications where
bursting and rapid growth are common. Unless customers
carefully monitor their bandwidth use and caps, it is easy to run
out of bandwidth and seriously impact the system and user
experience.
Also many systems require per-server bandwidth purchases.
Thus, there is no aggregation or system-wide bandwidth. This
makes building scalable systems difficult, for example with
multiple web servers, or with a diversified system that has
different sets of web, search, and API servers. Some clouds
like Qingcloud and ChinaCache are using VPC-style systems
with aggregated bandwidth, with others to follow.
Calculating, purchasing, monitoring, and keeping track of all the
bandwidth pieces can become quite complex. Of course, all of
this is made worse by pre-pay and the time or difficulty of
increasing pre-purchased bandwidth.
Note that AWS bandwidth and pricing policies have not yet
been announced, so it is possible that they will use transfer
pricing just as they do in the rest of the world.
Clouds also have other bandwidth and network challenges,
though they vary by service. For example, Aliyun used to limit
public data transfer from VM instances to the object storage
service, or OSS, to 10Mbps per connection or transfer process
per thread; although they did not limit transfers to OSS via
internal bandwidth and IPs. However, Aliyun currently has no
limit in public data transfer from VM instances to OSS.!

Connectivity & CDNs
Bandwidth connectivity in China is a complex area, with most
data centers only having single carrier connectivity, such as
China Telecom in the south or China Netcom in the north. This
significantly restricts customers in these data centers from
reaching users in all parts of China, especially on mobile
networks where more and more users are focusing their time.
BGP is the obvious solution to this, but it is still uncommon in
China due to the cost and the required inter-carrier cooperation
requirements. However, this is slowly changing and in 2012-
2013 the number of BGP-based systems had been greatly
increased, despite the fact that it has been only at the higher
end. Though the majority BGP systems are only connected to
the two or three most common carriers, sometimes leaving out
mobile. Furthermore, some systems advertised as BGP are
actually pseudo-BGP with special routing buried in the IDC core
routing system to make things look correct, but in actuality they
are not as well connected as they proclaim.
The best IDCs, such as 21ViaNet and the Aliyun cloud, offer
what they call 8-line BGP, which are western-style systems with
full BGP to all eight carriers in China, including Telecom,
Netcom, Unicom, Mobile, CERNET, Railcom, and the rest.
These are the best solutions, but are quite expensive; so much
so that they can only be used for core interactive systems while
all static assets, especially video, etc., should be handled in
CDNs.
Fortunately in the cloud area, more and more public clouds are
offering some level of BGP service, from 2 and 3-line all the
way up to 8-line, at varying price and service levels.!

Summary
Public and Private Clouds are available in China, with
significant implications for Internet infrastructure, data centers,
startups, Chinese innovation, and more. Numerous local and
international players are now in the market, bringing global
standards and technology along with local innovation and
China-specific features to this exciting and fast-moving market.
This is an exciting time in the Chinese cloud space, and for the
companies large and small that are interested in using clouds to
further their business goals, speed innovation, save money,
and be successful.
ChinaNetCloud is a partner of, and expert in, all of the key
cloud systems, technologies, and services being offered in
China; and as the pioneer in Operations-as-a-Service, we can
help customers choose, architect, design, build, manage, and
operate any size or type of cloud for Internet-facing system.
!
!
!

About ChinaNetCloud
Founded in Shanghai in 2008, ChinaNetCloud is one of the world's largest Internet Managed
Services companies, with an emphasis on server operations, especially Reliability, Performance,
Scale, Security, and Cost Savings.
Focused on large-scale systems, ChinaNetCloud helps customers design, build, and operate any
Internet-facing system and service, up to hundreds of millions of users and billions of page views
per day.
ChinaNetCloud is a pioneer in OaaS, or Operations-as-a-Service, a new 21st Century concept for
managing clouds and systems as a service. On public clouds such as Aliyun or AWS, OaaS focuses
on system architecture, building, optimizing, and 24x7 management of the system. This includes full
or shared responsibility for Reliability, Performance, Scaling, Security, and Cost Savings.
Global Headquarters
X2 Space 1-601
1238 Xietu Road
Xuhui District
Shanghai, China 200032
Beijing Office
Lee World Business Building #305
57 Middle Xingfu Village Road
Chaoyang District
Beijing, China 100027
Silicon Valley Office
440 North Wolfe Road
Sunnyvale, CA 94085
USA
+86 (21) 6422-1946
Sales@ChinaNetCloud.com
www.ChinaNetCloud.com
Additional Trademarks:
Amazon and AWS are registered trademarks of Amazon.
IBM and SmartCloud Enterprise+ are registered trademarks of IBM.
Rackspace is a registered trademark of Rackspace.
This Whitepaper is provided by ChinaNetCloud for your information, based on our experience and public
information that we believe is accurate. No portion of this Whitepaper may be reproduced, copied, or
distributed without written permission from ChinaNetCloud.
Copyright 2015 by ChinaNetCloud - All Rights Reserved.

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