Alibaba Cloud to offer DBaaS to digitalise Indian businesses

The cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, Alibaba Cloud, has launched its database products and real-life applications in the Indian market.

The Hangzhou based firm's database product POLARDB played a crucial role in the success of the recently concluded Alibaba Group's 11.11 global shopping festival, according to a statement.

The new Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) will offer a fully managed cloud-hosted database facility with benefits around performance and resilience. It will help systems to bounce back quickly from hardware failure, which is essential in supporting users’ online activities real-time.

“As businesses cater to users in a cloud-led internet age, the need for cloud-native databases that are elastic, available, intelligent, and secure will only continue to grow. We believe the value proposition of POLARDB and AnalyticDB will be extremely useful in the Indian context as more users come online and businesses cater to their needs.” Dr. Feifei Li, VP of Alibaba Group, president and senior fellow of Database Systems, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence said.

Alibaba says its solutions will help customers meet their growing digital demands. Its cheap and flexible cloud solutions are targeted towards companies in the e-commerce, gaming, media, and e-learning segments. 

Alibaba Group has invested in multiple startups in India such as Paytm and Zomato. These companies have migrated to its cloud post-investment. 

"POLARDB is compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, supporting up to 100TB of data. During the recently concluded 24-hour 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, wherein Alibaba Cloud powered US$1billion of GMV in 68 Seconds, POLARDB dealt with over 87million requests per second, and supported the analytics that was generated by customer activity in real-time," the company said in a statement.

In addition to POLARDB, Alibaba Cloud also offers other database products including OceanBase and MongoDB to customers such as PayTM. According to Gartner, Alibaba Cloud is the largest public cloud provider in the Asia Pacific.

“Given India’s business environment, it is essential for companies to have access to reliable, cost-efficient but high-performance cloud computing infrastructure in order to scale. This is also critical in building up India’s future digital capabilities. With the local and global drive for Digital transformation continues to be on top of organizations’ agenda,” said Alex Li, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud South Asia.

Recently, Alibaba Cloud partnered with India-based ZNet Technologies, a cloud distributor offering cloud infrastructure and managed services for the distribution of its cloud infrastructure and managed services in India.