Alibaba Cloud Announces Industry Leading Availability Commitments

Upgraded Service Level Agreement commits to 99.995% availability for its multi-zone Elastic Compute Service

HANGZHOU, December 20, 2019 – Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, unveiled an upgraded Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a heightened availability commitment for its Elastic Compute Service (ECS) solution – an industry-leading 99.995% availability rate for services across multiple zones within a region. With the elevated availability standards, Alibaba Cloud has become the first major cloud player to provide service availability rates beyond 99.99% – pushing the limits of cloud reliability and customer service by going beyond the industry norm.

Alibaba Cloud also raised its availability rate commitment for individual instances to 99.975% in this new SLA, another industry-leading move. Back in February 2018, Alibaba Cloud was the first to push the individual instances availability rate to 99.95%, a year ahead of other major Cloud platforms. The announcement of the new SLA is supported by the launch of a 12-month ECS free trial plan for small-to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to help them migrate to the cloud.

As cloud adoption continues to gain momentum across the world, more companies are deploying their mission-critical workloads on the cloud. Besides committing to the highest availability standards, Alibaba Cloud ECS instances also come with Anti-DDoS protection and disaster recovery capabilities to safeguard customer applications from attacks and accidents.

"As more IT applications and infrastructures across various industries transition to cloud-native platforms, Alibaba Cloud has the responsibility to ensure our customers can count on even higher levels of availability and reliability as they conduct their business in the cloud," said Jiangwei Jiang, Partner of Alibaba Group, Head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Utility Products. "Our industry-leading cloud availability rates are codified in our Service Level Agreement and is part of our commitment to our customers that Alibaba Cloud is a reliable partner that will be there to support their growth ambitions every step of the way."

Alibaba Cloud's confidence in fulfilling the pledge stems from the performance charted by its recently launched 6th generation ECS instances, which is built around the groundbreaking X-Dragon chip developed in-house by Alibaba Cloud. Put to the test using challenging e-commerce scenarios, this next generation ECS demonstrated a remarkable 20% improvement in computing power, a 30% reduction in memory latency and 70% reduction in storage IO latency compared with last generation.

The extreme scalability and reliability of Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure ensured there was zero downtime during this year's 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, with a record-shattering USD38.4 billion of Gross Merchandize Volume (GMV) transacted in 24 hours.

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com), the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is among the world's top three IaaS providers, according to Gartner. It is also the largest provider of public cloud services in China, according to IDC. Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, start-ups, corporations and public services. Alibaba Cloud is the official Cloud Services Partner of the International Olympic Committee.