On the rare "Crazy Thursday" on February 29, Alibaba Cloud set off a "V me 20%" type discount.
On February 29, Alibaba Cloud announced the largest price reduction in history, with an average reduction of 20% on the official website of more than 100 products and more than 500 product specifications, and a maximum reduction of 55%, with new ** effective from now on, and both new and old customers can enjoy discounts. After the price reduction, Alibaba Cloud's core products** broke through the lowest price in the whole network.
Regarding the price adjustment, Liu Weiguang, senior vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group and president of the public cloud business department, said that the price adjustment is determined by the public cloud business model. Alibaba Cloud also hopes that through this large-scale price reduction, more enterprises will use advanced public cloud services and accelerate the popularization and development of cloud computing in all walks of life in China.
More than 100 products have been reduced by 20% across the board
Shared with new and old customers.
According to reports, this price reduction is in the form of direct drop on the official website, which is applicable to both new and old customers who purchase on the official website. The price reduction has also far exceeded the past price reduction actions, almost all products have broken through the lowest price on the whole network, and the price reduction product range has also directly covered millions of enterprises and developers.
Among them, ECS is reduced by up to 36%, Object Storage Service (OSS) is reduced by up to 55%, and RDS is reduced by up to 40%. Whether it is a large customer or a small and medium-sized customer, a new customer or an old customer, you can place an order directly according to the new *** on the official website of Alibaba Cloud.
In fact, this is not the first time Alibaba Cloud has downgraded its products**. Liu Weiguang revealed that compared with several other dividend releases in history, this price reduction has three advantages: "two most, one first", the largest range of products in history, the widest beneficiary group, and the first time to give profits to customers The unfulfilled part of the stock order.
Taking the cloud server U1 product, which is the most popular among small and medium-sized enterprises, as an example, it costs 768 yuan a year to buy a five-year version with 2C4G configuration, and only 485 yuan a year after the price reduction, a price reduction of 36%. OSS Standard Storage - Local Redundancy from 012 GB a month down to 009 GB, down 25%. In terms of databases, taking the ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL basic series as an example, it costs 936 yuan to purchase the five-year version of the 1C2G general-purpose configuration, and only 562 yuan a year after the price reduction, a price reduction of 40%. In addition, Alibaba Cloud has increased the monthly free Internet traffic quota for CDT from 10 GB to 20 GB.
For old customers who have been on annual subscriptions before, Alibaba Cloud has also launched corresponding preferential policies. If the customer renews the subscription within 3 months after the price reduction is released, the unconsumed annual subscription duration can be rebilled according to the new **. For example, an enterprise previously purchased a cloud server of 100,000 yuan for 1 year, and now it has only taken 6 months, as long as the customer renews it for another year, the 50,000 yuan of cloud resources that have not been consumed before can be re-billed according to the new ** (20% reduction), and the difference can be deducted from the renewal order, that is, 10,000 yuan less paid.
In addition, Alibaba Cloud has also fully upgraded the "99 Plan" to launch entry-level cloud servers for individual developers and small and medium-sized enterprises in 99 and 199 yuan.
The essence of the technology competition is the competition of the cloud.
However, the penetration rate of public cloud in China is still low.
Recently, the Wensheng ** large model SORA released by OpenAI has set off a new round of technological innovation. In the eyes of many AI experts, OpenAI's success is the result of "a miracle", that is, the cloud services provided by Microsoft give it strong computing power.
Behind this is a huge gap in the use of cloud services between Chinese and foreign enterprises. Data shows that the average resource utilization rate of a large number of self-built IDCs in China is less than 5%, while the resource utilization efficiency of data centers can reach 25%-40% for public cloud vendors such as AWS, Google, and Alibaba Cloud. If the utilization rate of data center computing power is increased from 5% to 25%, China can save 80 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year.
After more than 10 years of cloud computing development in China, the penetration rate of public cloud is still significantly lower than that of mature markets in Europe and the United States. According to Liu Weiguang, the size of the server stock in the Chinese market is 20 million, and the size of the server stock in the United States is about 21 million, but the computing power provided in the form of public cloud services in the United States accounts for 60%, and China is only 28%.
In recent years, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other departments have issued a series of regulations and standards related to cloud computing. During the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, it was further emphasized to promote the deep integration of cloud computing and other industries, promote digital industrialization and industrial digitization, and build a number of strategic emerging industries with their own characteristics, complementary advantages, and reasonable structure.
Making the cloud a public service and creating social value has been the original intention of Alibaba Cloud since the first day of its establishment. Talking about the original intention of price adjustment, Liu Weiguang said that in the future, the cloud must be the first choice for enterprises and developers, and technological innovation must be born on the cloud first.
It can be seen that cloud computing is a business model with network effects and scale effects. Liu Weiguang pointed out that the more customers who use the cloud, the larger the scale, the cheaper the cloud will be. Because of this, as China's leading cloud computing company, Alibaba Cloud hopes to use advanced public cloud services and accelerate the popularization and development of cloud computing in all walks of life in China through this large-scale price reduction. ”
Self-built IDC or Data Center?
The latter has "seven" values.
In fact, there are two ways for enterprises to obtain cloud services: self-built IDC and purchased cloud services. Why did companies choose the latter in the end?
More than 300 years ago, Adam Smith emphasized the importance of the "division of labor". Compared with self-built IDCs, using data centers can not only avoid wasting hardware resources, but also reduce computing power consumption. Liu Weiguang elaborated on the seven values of cloud computing:
Save on the total IT expenditure of the enterprise. The elastic capabilities provided by cloud computing allow customers to adopt a combination of normalization and elasticity to achieve a significant reduction in average resource holdings. At the same time, the combination of software and hardware on Alibaba Cloud will help customers achieve higher security resource utilization when virtual machines and containers are running. For example, after the full-stack migration to Alibaba Cloud, the CPU utilization rate increased by 125%, but the total cost of ownership was reduced by more than 30%. In addition, the public cloud can greatly save the resource preparation time for business start-up, and it takes at least several months from planning to use of a self-built IDC, while the use of a public cloud can be used immediately. Left-handed doctor quickly completed resource deployment based on Alibaba Cloud public cloud, and the project launch time was shortened by 67%.
elastic use of computing power flexibly to reduce idle waste of resources. The public cloud supports global multi-region deployment, and has sufficient resources to create and release resources anytime, anywhere. A passenger ticket platform needs to cope with the geometric increase in ticket purchase demand during major holidays, and Alibaba Cloud elastic computing products can quickly expand 30,000 core computing resources within 1 minute to cope with traffic peaks and smoothly support the highest ticket sales volume of 20 million tickets in a single day.
Further, the enterprise IT architecture is upgraded and evolved. Enterprise cloud migration can realize the modernization and upgrading of IT architecture, so that the original siloed architecture based on traditional IT can evolve into a distributed architecture with high availability, multi-location and multi-active, and hybrid deployment, so as to better support the business strategy innovation of enterprises. Based on Alibaba Cloud, Ctrip has upgraded its high-availability architecture to achieve intra-city multi-active and unitized deployment.
Rapid adoption of the latest and most advanced technology stack. Public cloud is not only an IT infrastructure, but also provides an advanced and rich product technology stack. For example, the abundant products provided on the cloud, such as containers, databases, data analysis, and data development and governance, can help enterprises apply new technology stacks at a faster pace. Himalaya uses Alibaba Cloud products to accelerate the speed from data insights to business decisions, with the average duration of offline tasks reduced by 42% and the duration of long-tail tasks reduced by 70%.
Expand and rapidly expand global business. Alibaba Cloud operates 89 availability zones in 30 public cloud regions on four continents, which can help Chinese enterprises expand globally and greatly simplify cumbersome IT infrastructure and compliance matters. Based on Alibaba Cloud Singapore's public cloud nodes, network and security product solutions, Luckin Coffee is rapidly expanding the Southeast Asian market. Based on Alibaba Cloud's global cloud computing services, Transsion has greatly improved the efficiency of business iteration and significantly reduced the total cost.
intelligence, better use of artificial intelligence technology. The public cloud is the best partner for AI, and enterprises can use the public cloud to quickly pull up huge training and inference resources and realize AI innovation at a low cost. Baichuan Intelligent completes the training of the 1,000-calorie large model based on Alibaba Cloud public cloud, with a maximum of 26 days of training without manual intervention, and iterates a model every month in the initial stage. Last year's rapid popularity of Miao Ya Camera, the peak of the access volume required at least a few thousand GPU servers to meet, Miao Ya on the Alibaba Cloud public cloud emergency expansion, quickly achieved computing power**.
improve the IT talent structure of the enterprise. By using cloud computing, companies can allow IT talent to focus more on business development and innovation.
In addition, Alibaba Cloud's confidence in price reduction also comes from its strong technical strength. For example, the Feitian operating system and CIPU architecture can bring stronger performance under the same specifications and resources, while achieving extreme elasticity and greatly improving resource efficiency. Alibaba Cloud's self-developed Pangu storage system greatly improves storage resource utilization through technologies such as EC and compression. The continuous optimization of self-developed chips such as Yitian 710 can improve the cost performance of databases, big data, AI, high-performance computing, and first-class codecs by more than 80%.
Alibaba Cloud's price reduction is not a short-term market competitive behavior, but a long-term strategic choice, which is determined by the business model of the public cloud. Liu Weiguang said that Alibaba Cloud has provided millions of customers with a reusable global cloud computing network and resource pool, and the more customers use, the more the cost of chain procurement, equal sharing of R&D costs and resource idle costs can be continuously reduced. "The more customers who use Alibaba Cloud, the larger the scale, the cheaper the cloud will be; With the continuous expansion of scale, the dividends of technology will continue to be released to give back to customers. ”