The Clouds Are Different Over China
Summary
A few weeks ago, the Twitters were awash with stories about Amazon Web Services, the biggest public cloud vendor bar none, pulling out of the Chinese market. The way things are done in China It might seem weird for these big hulking technology vendors like Amazon and Microsoft to cower in the face of government regulations, but Chinese law is a stern beast and if you want to do business in the absolutely massive market that is Chine, you need to play by their rules. But politics aside, this lack of a level playing field means there are some players in China who might just have a way of competing with the globally dominant triumvirate of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. At the recent OpenStack summit, Tencent was announced as a gold sponsor of the foundation that shepherds the open source cloud operating system. Of course AWS has a far bigger base to grow from, and hence a tougher job gaining high percentage marks, but the comparison between Alibaba and Google is particularly telling.