Given that I do spend a bit of time going deaf in data centers here in China, I don’t see that being physically possible.

I can _believe_ they add up to 100,000 virtual machines in a year, which would run on a lesser number of machines – 20,000 would be in the realm of possible, although there really isn’t that much ip space available here, and ip6 is still not really rolled out for the masses yet. If they’re counting those rather overpriced dense blade servers as multiple units, then sure, can do 96 in a 4U, but thats not really playing fair with numbers..

Hmm… thinking about it
1000 x 4U @ 96 = 100,000k+- is eminently doable…, although you pretty much have to build your own power infrastructure for that, as data centers here are more concerned about power than bandwidth.. Isn’t strictly speaking 100k servers though.

I can believe 100k machines assuming heavy blade dense (although I would probably be looking into re-architecting, and making regional / subregional cloud load balancers if I was doing it that way).

IP Space is the real issue.
Most of it is being stuck behind load balancers anyway, but even so, we’re pretty much out of ip space here in .cn

@forestzrd pretty much has it down pat.

It will be interesting when Alibaba starts promoting their aliyun cloud service more heavily.
Its either Youku, Alibaba, or Tencent who will aim to become the next amazon web server competitor here.

Lawrence

It’s true that they are ‘big’ from business volume perspective but not ‘strong’ from technical innovation perspective compared with counterparts in America. Though they are much agile and innovative compared with local IT and telco companies.

Talking about cloud computing… i still hold highest expectation on these internet giants based on their capability of technical scale-out, experience of web scale operation, agility of innovation and of course financial advantages… much similar pattern in other countries and regions. This expectation already backed by facts:

1. Sina SAE(Sina App Engine) is no. 1 public PaaS in China which could be roughly corresponded to Google GAE(Google App Engine). Sina’s cloud ambition is not ended at PaaS… with their active involvement in OpenStack community and Beta SWS(Sina Web Service – AWS alike naming) we can expect their excellent play in IaaS arena.

2. Alibaba Aliyun is no.1 public IaaS in China which could be corresponded to Amazon AWS… and with the re-org within Alibaba group – merger between Aliyun and Net.cn(the largest DNS and web hoster for SMEs) recently, seems no. 1 IaaS provider in China is firmly laid.

3. Tencent just released news that they will debut full-blown IaaS & PaaS services.few minutes ago…Tencent was ‘notorious’ for years as ‘startup killer’ and ‘innovation killer’:) I will never doubt that Tencent will be one of the major ‘Cloud Killer’ in China.

Well talking about GFW(Great Firewall)…it’s a little bit complex.
People don’t like it, ‘Cloudant’ especially! With GFW, we can’t leverage many many great cloud services especially Google services for the well-known reasons. The situation is getting worse due to MIIT regulations on telco VAT license issue… unfortunately cloud services fall into telco VAT. The situation could and might be changed somehow after the Azure’s landing in China as a milestone just one or two months ago… and in that case Microsoft make their cloud way to China with workaround – cooperating with local government and local IDC service provider. JV will be another workaround majorly used by cloud giants from abroad.
While local CSP(Cloud Service Providers) should thank GFW & regulations and wish it long live as long as possible:) which buy them much time and space to survive or grow big just like what happened in Web and Web2.0 era.

There will be cloud giants in China just like what happened 10 years back in internet or web era thanks to this huge population and therefore huge market! BTW, would thank all the smart guys and their innovation in silicon valley, diligent and hard working chinese will ‘copy-cat’ again and end up eventually with quite some cloud business giants again:)

Tencent owns WeChat which is essentially Path + Whatsapp +Talkbox. 300 million users and expanding internationally.

Qzone is mostly predominant in Tier 2-4 cities. The Facebook of China is Renren (college kids) and Kaixin (white collar workers)

You’re misinformed there. If they can’t control it, they’ll close it.