Overview... 4 ChinaNetCloud China Cloud Overview... 6 SaaS... 6 PaaS... 7 IaaS... 7 History of Chinese Clouds... 8

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2 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 UCloud QingCloud (ChinaC) HuaYun ChinaCache Huawei Cloud ViaCloud Shanda Grand Cloud Sina Cloud Jinshan / KS Yun Cloud StdYun Cloud Baidu Cloud JingDong Cloud International Public Clouds Amazon Web Services Microsoft Azure Historical Public Clouds CloudEx Joyent Hi-China Cloud Storage Qiniu Upyun ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

3 Private Clouds IBM SmartCloud Enterprise OpenStack ChinaNetCloud Cloud Feature Matrix China Cloud Challenges Post-Pay Minimum Time Period / Flexibility / Contract Technology & Feature Limits Reliability Security Bandwidth Connectivity & CDNs Summary About ChinaNetCloud Edition ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 3

4 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-uponrow 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. 4 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

5 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. ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 5

6 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. 6 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

7 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. ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 7

8 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. 8 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

9 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. ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 9

10 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 10 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

11 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2013 Based in: Shenzhen Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou More information regarding Tencent Q-Cloud is available at ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 11

12 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2012 Based in: Shanghai Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Zhejiang, Guanzhou, and North America More information regarding UCloud is available at 12 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

13 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 highperformance 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2013 Based in: Beijing Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Beijing, Guangdong, and Hong Kong More information regarding QingCloud is available at ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 13

14 (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: Based in: Wuxi Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: With partners in over 20 cities More information regarding HuaYun is available at 14 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

15 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2011 Based in: Beijing Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Beijing, Hong Kong, and the United States More information regarding ChinaCache is located at ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 15

16 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2011 Based in: Beijing Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen More information regarding Huawei Cloud is available at 16 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

17 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 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2011 Based in: Shanghai Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Shanghai More information regarding ViaCloud is available at ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 17

18 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-aservice, 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2011 Based in: Shanghai Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Shanghai and Beijing More information regarding Grand Cloud is available at 18 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

19 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-aservice, yet without any actual customer-facing VMs. Name: Sina Cloud Parent: Sina Offering Clouds Since: 2009 Based in: Beijing Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: China More information regarding Sina Cloud is available at ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 19

20 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 3 rd, 2014, Xiao Mi announced a $1 billion investment in KS Yun over the next three to five years. Name: Jinshan Cloud Parent: KingSoft Offering Clouds Since: 2012 Based in: Beijing Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: China More information regarding KS Yun is available at 20 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

21 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2012 Based in: Beijing Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: China More information regarding StdYun is available at! ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 21

22 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 Offering Clouds Since: 2012 Based in: Beijing Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Beijing More information regarding Baidu Cloud is available at yun.baidu.com and developer.baidu.com 22 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

23 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) Offering Clouds Since: 2012 Based in: Beijing Support Languages: Chinese Data Centers: Beijing More information regarding JingDong Cloud is available at appengine.jd.com ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 23

24 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 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 interregion 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 24 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

25 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 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 25

26 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 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 Hi-China was purchased in 2012 by Aliyun and ceased public cloud services in 2013.! 26 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

27 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 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 antilinking, advertising, and user-agent-specific functionality. More information regarding Upyun is available at ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 27

28 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.! 28 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

29 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 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 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 29

30 Cloud Feature Matrix Cloud Feature Matrix 30 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

31 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 it 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 s or old mobile SMS, creating problems when employees leave or change mobile phone providers, both of which are very common in China. ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 31

32 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. 32 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

33 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, nonupgradeable 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. ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 33

34 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 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. 34 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

35 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.! ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 35

36 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 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.! 36 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

37 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.!!! ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China 37

38 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 Xietu Road Xuhui District Shanghai, China Beijing Office Lee World Business Building # Middle Xingfu Village Road Chaoyang District Beijing, China Silicon Valley Office 440 North Wolfe Road Sunnyvale, CA USA +86 (21) Sales@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. 38 ChinaNetCloud Clouds in China

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