Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS, Inc.), an Amazon.com company, announced the upcoming limited preview of its China Region for the AWS cloud computing platform. This will be the fourth AWS Region in Asia Pacific and the tenth Region globally. In the limited preview, which will be deployed in early 2014, a select group of China-based and multinational companies with customers in China will be invited to begin using AWS Cloud services in the AWS China Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Businesses and software developers can apply for access to the limited preview in the AWS China Region today at http://www.amazonaws.cn.
To provide the best experience for customers in China and to comply with China’s legal and regulatory requirements, AWS China has taken a multi-partner approach for delivering cloud services. AWS is partnering with multiple local Chinese providers, including ChinaNetCenter and SINNET, who will provide the necessary Internet Data Center (IDC) and Internet Service Provider (ISP) services, such as infrastructure, bandwidth, and network capabilities, to support the delivery of AWS software technology services in China.
AWS Cloud eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT for Chinese businesses
Prior to AWS, businesses would take on the massive capital investment of building their own IT infrastructure or contracting with a vendor for datacenter capacity that they might or might not use. This choice meant either paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that their forecasted capacity was insufficient to keep pace with their growth. AWS has changed the way that businesses think about technology infrastructure. Using AWS, businesses incur no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, turn capital expense into variable operating expense, scale seamlessly by adding or shedding resources on demand, free-up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running IT – all without sacrificing security, operational performance, or reliability.
Thousands of customers in China have been using AWS in other Regions across the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia. With the launch of the new AWS China Region, these customers will be able to run their applications on infrastructure in China, which significantly reduces latency to local end users and enables companies with requirements to store their data in China to easily do so. Additionally, customers will have access to the world’s leading cloud computing platform, representing more than a decade of software technology innovation and spanning a broad set of AWS Cloud services: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Management Console, and AWS Premium Support.
“Current and prospective AWS customers have asked us to build a local AWS Region in China,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “China represents an important long-term market segment for AWS. We are looking forward to working with Chinese customers, partners, and government institutions to help small and large organizations use cloud computing to innovate and deploy faster, save money, expand their geographic reach, and do so without sacrificing security, availability, data durability, and reliability.”
Partnering with Chinese government organizations to advance cloud computing in China
In a ceremony today in Beijing, AWS China signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Beijing municipal government and the Government of Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region. The MOU reflects the signing parties’ intent to construct and develop high-performing, reliable, and economical AWS cloud computing services that leverage facilities and resources in Beijing and Western China, and are promoted to customers across China.
Additionally, the Government of Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region intends to use AWS Cloud services to power its public service applications in an effort to fully utilize the benefits of cloud computing to improve the efficiency and user experiences of its public services.
Together with Beijing and Ningxia, AWS intends to help foster development of a robust IT sector in Western China, empowered through cloud computing, that enables more Chinese customers to innovate and grow existing and new businesses. To jump start that goal, AWS China is also working with Shanghai Jiading Industrial Zone on an incubation program that supports startup businesses through a combination of resources from AWS China along with a variety of incentives from Shanghai Jiading Industrial Zone. AWS expects to introduce incubation programs in other parts of China over time.
Mr. Yuan Jiajun, Executive Vice Chairman of the Government of Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region said, “We are glad to have the support of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other related government departments for Ningxia and AWS to develop AWS Cloud services in China, through the innovative front-shop-back-factory model. This will help fully utilize datacenter and infrastructure resources in Beijing and Ningxia, and provide highly reliable and secure cloud services to millions of Chinese customers. The local presence of AWS will help to accelerate the pace-of-innovation of Chinese businesses and further bolster China’s economy.”
Chinese customers using AWS to reduce costs, improve agility, and expand globally
Among the thousands of customers in China already using AWS are Xiaomi, Qihoo 360, TCL, Tiens, NQ mobile, FunPlus, Kingsoft, Mobotap, Hisense, Light in the Box, Papaya mobile, Madhouse, DerbySoft, Tap4fun, DeNA China, Boyaa interactive, Huan.tv, and Sungy Mobile Limited, many of whom will participate in the limited preview of the AWS China Region.
Xiaomi is a leading smartphone and mobile Internet service company that was, according to the company’s slogan, “born for the enthusiasts.” Established in April 2010, the company now has more than 14.2 million mobile users in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan as well as $2 billion in revenues. In order to provide reliable mobile services for its global users, Xiaomi chose AWS to provide a highly reliable, scalable infrastructure to support their growth as well as deliver a rapid downloading experience for customers. “When we were evaluating cloud providers, we realized that only AWS had the experience to provide a reliable infrastructure and the fast connection speeds demanded by global users,” said Li Yongbin, Engineering Head of IT Infrastructure at Xiaomi. “Five months after our app store launched running on AWS, it exceeded 100 million user downloads. It’s exciting to see such a large number of downloads in such a short period of time. By using AWS, our download speed is 30 percent faster, and we've been able to cut our capital expenditure to zero.”
Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd is one of China’s leading Internet service providers focusing on security products and services running on both mobile devices and PCs. Qihoo has more than 450M active users in China, and has been publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. Qihoo conducted a thorough analysis of both performance and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) using AWS Cloud services and, as a result, decided to deploy its international platform on AWS. “By tapping into AWS, Qihoo 360 was able to dramatically lower its time to market globally. Traditional datacenters and server purchases would have taken months to deploy, especially considering our rate of international expansion. Today with AWS, we are able to deploy globally and be in production in a few days,” said Tan Xiaosheng, Vice President of Technical Operations at Qihoo 360. “After using AWS, Qihoo 360 has improved its overseas user experience, lowering content delivery networking (CDN) costs by 30 percent, and achieving 10x growth in traffic with just a 3x growth in overall cost. Since achieving these significant business benefits through the elasticity and agility that AWS provides us, we’ve been anxiously awaiting an AWS Region in China.”
Mobotap is a Beijing-based startup focusing on development of mobile services. Their flagship product, Dolphin Browser, is used by millions of users, in 24 languages and across 27 countries. “Three years ago, we made the decision to run our entire global service for the Dolphin Browser on AWS. The entire infrastructure is managed by only one person, who spends less than 10 percent of his time managing the infrastructure,” said Yang Yongzhi, CEO of Mobotap. “Without the scalability and agility provided by AWS, it would have been impossible to manage an infrastructure of such scale with such lean resources.”
Tiens Group is a leading company that is focused in biotechnology and the health management industry. The company's businesses reach over 180 countries worldwide, and its products now serve more than 30 million families and business partners around the world. As Tiens has a broad product portfolio as well as operations in 110 countries, maintaining availability and reliability of IT systems while achieving business agility was a significant challenge. Previously, Tiens bought the equipment it needed for its IT infrastructure and then shipped it to different locations for deployment locally. After migrating to AWS, Tiens has achieved many benefits including, fast-deployment, unified management, and highly elastic system performance to support dynamic customer demands. Ms. Bai Ping, CEO of Tiens Group said, “After using AWS, we’ve realized it’s a new world. AWS not only helps shorten our system deployment time, but also helps us reduce the overall costs of our IT system by 50 percent. We are also delighted with AWS’s innovative pay-as-you-go billing model, the regular price cuts, and various ways for us to continuously reduce our overall spending.”
FunPlus is a leading social gaming service provider founded in 2010 and headquartered in Beijing. With active gamers coming from all over the world, they rank in the top seven Facebook gaming providers with more than five million players daily. “Before using AWS, we spent too much time renting servers from different IDC providers to accommodate our growing user base. Now through AWS, we’ve gained much better agility, availability, and reliability. We’ve also been able to deploy high-performance gaming services in all our markets around the world and be much closer to our customers,” said Guan Yitao, CTO of FunPlus. “The scalability that AWS provides us is unmatched. When demand for our game grew from one million to three million active players in just three months, AWS allowed us to instantly grow to 300 servers, and the whole process needed only one engineer to manage.”
In addition to a broad base of customers, AWS has a vibrant partner ecosystem in China that has built innovative solutions and services on AWS. ChinaNetCenter is the preferred partner for Content Delivery Network (CDN) services for AWS China. Some of the China-based consulting partners include, Cloudgo, Bamboo Cloud, Bamboo Technologies, ChinaNetCloud, and Hitachi Consulting (China). Among the many leading technology partners are Neusoft, Trend Micro, Madeira, and more. For the full list of the members of the AWS Partner Network, please refer to: http://aws.amazon.com/cn/partners/overview/.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. maintains an affiliate in China with offices in Beijing to support enterprises, public sector organizations, academic institutions, small-to-mid size companies, startups, and developers on their use of AWS Cloud services.
AWS also maintains a local technical support operation in China, as part of the AWS global network of support center operations, and supports customers in China with local languages. The China support operations will help customers of all sizes and technical abilities to successfully utilize AWS products and features. AWS Support is a one-on-one, fast-response support channel that is staffed 24x7x365 with experienced and technical support engineers.
