Introduction
Today, I replaced the site search I implemented myself with the open search service provided by Alibaba Cloud. Building a personal website is not only about sharing and recording knowledge, but also exploring new technologies and fields. My personal website went from the open-source WordPress to my self-developed NEILREN4J, and from virtual hosting to Alibaba Cloud servers. For me, each step was an attempt in a new field. In constant trying I used more and more Alibaba Cloud services, so I want to share my feelings about moving to the cloud.
Cloud Services
As I developed my personal website, I used more and more cloud services, including ECS cloud servers, elastic IPs, dedicated virtual networks, cloud disks, RDS databases, OSS object storage, CDN distribution networks, open search engines, log analysis services, Cloud Shield, Cloud Monitor, and DNS domain resolution. Alibaba Cloud’s products and services gradually penetrated my entire system. It seemed to integrate powerful cloud services, but I noticed that my system’s dependence on and coupling with Alibaba Cloud were increasing, so I became a bit worried.
Worries on the Cloud
First, suppose you are an enterprise- or industrial-grade user. If you use Alibaba Cloud’s services, then your means of production, data, and business situation will all be exposed to Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud could even use big data to estimate the scale of your enterprise, its business situation, and even notice the posture on the Internet. These data may eventually be provided to any company or department of the Alibaba Group. If your business overlaps with Alibaba’s, you should think more about whether to hand operational data over to a cloud service company.
Second, using more and more cloud services in your business system creates severe dependence. Once the cloud provider stops a certain cloud service, you should consider whether you have the ability to implement a replacement function, whether you can smoothly and safely transition to your own implementation system, and the compatibility of your own implementation—and all this brings increased costs, labor costs, time costs, and even systems you simply cannot implement on your own, such as machine learning and artificial neural networks. This creates a strong dependence on the cloud service provider; once the provider stops a service, it may affect the functionality and even the security of your own business system.
Finally, although cloud service providers offer high security guarantees and online availability guarantees, have you ever thought that on a real day their hard disks fail, causing data loss, and the physical hard disks can never be retrieved—data recovery depends entirely on the operator’s notice; if there is none, then it is just gone, and you watch helplessly, unable to do anything.
A Classic Case
On June 1, 2017, SF Express (Shunfeng) closed the data interface of Cainiao Logistics, behind which was Alibaba’s hope that SF Express would abandon Tencent Cloud and switch to Alibaba Cloud. At 6 p.m. on May 31, Cainiao received SF Express’s notice of suspending the data interface. At midnight on June 1, SF Express closed the data feedback from its self-pickup lockers. At noon on June 1, SF Express further closed the feedback of all logistics information on the Taobao platform. In May this year, Cainiao proposed to stop cooperation with Fengchao on the grounds of data security and took Fengchao’s interface information offline at 0:00 on June 1. Today Cainiao, on the grounds that the agreement expired and citing information security, targeted and blocked Fengchao. SF Express also said that Cainiao’s action was actually a targeted blocking campaign; apart from Fengchao, no other platform closed its data interface. The reason Cainiao blocked SF Express was that Alibaba had always wanted SF Express to switch from Tencent Cloud to Alibaba Cloud.
Why did Alibaba want SF Express to use its own cloud service? Has anyone thought about it? Because SF Express undertakes the physical logistics of the e-commerce platform, and logistics information is of very high value. Through big data analysis, one can estimate the health of e-commerce. Alibaba does not want Tencent to master this data, so it blocked SF Express.