Alibaba Cloud announces 3rd generation of X-Dragon Architecture

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Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has launched the 3rd generation of X-Dragon Architecture to advance the computing era for artificial intelligence (AI). This upgrade will be rolled out to millions of Alibaba Cloud servers around the world from next year.

In total, Alibaba Cloud announced 85 new products and features at the annual flagship Apsara Conference, making significant advancements in the company’s evolution to data intelligence and AI-powered cloud. In the past six months, Alibaba Cloud has added 597 new products and features and more than 300 solutions to its portfolio, expanding a suite of cloud-native and AI-driven offerings. Data can now be analysed and visualised in real-time to generate actionable insights, enhancing decision-making and powering the digital transformation of more than 30 industries.

“We understand that the co-development of cloud and AI is vital to yield substantial synergies in this digital era. Alibaba Cloud has been striving to use its years of real-life experience from Alibaba Group’s ecosystem to bring these AI capabilities to its customers. Our AI platform has been a driving factor in Alibaba Group’s success from e-commerce and logistics, to finance and New Retail. Using Alibaba Cloud’s expertise and industry practices, our cloud makes powerful AI more accessible,” said Ma Jin, President of Product and Solution, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

The 3rd generation of X-Dragon Architecture integrates computing platforms including the elastic container service (ECS) bare metal server and virtual machines within a single architecture. During tests of e-commerce scenarios with high levels of demand for AI usage, the new X-Dragon architecture increased queries-per-second (QPS) by 30 per cent and decreased latency by 60 per cent. The cloud native nature of the solution means zero power wastage from running physical servers, and therefore reducing the unit computing cost by 50 per cent.

Alibaba Cloud also introduced the 6th generation of ECS instance, which is based on the X-Dragon architecture. This generation of ECS instance delivers 20 per cent improvement in computing power, 30 per cent reduction in memory latency and 70 per cent reduction in storage IO latency.

Alibaba Cloud already runs one of the largest AI stacks in the world for its Apsara AI Platform. This supports more than 40 business units from within the Alibaba ecosystem. Alibaba AI Platform runs over one trillion tasks every single day, processing one billion images, 1.2 million hours of videos, 550,000 hours of voice messages and 500 billion natural language sentences. It has served one billion people around the world.

Alibaba Cloud currently has more than 70 security and compliance accreditations worldwide. At this year’s conference this commitment is reinforced with the launch of a number of new products that support security and trust within a client’s network.

These included, the new Alibaba Cloud Security Whitepaper 4.0 which has redefined security frameworks for 360-degree protection in a cloud-native world, enabling end-to-end encryption on the public cloud. Additional enhanced options including Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) provide customers with full controls over encryption.

Also announced was the newly launched OSS Inner Trail which will log all applicable cloud operations, providing an additional layer of transparency to the customers who may have a higher demand on compliance and audits, for example customers in the finance industry.

The Apsara Conference, now in its 10th year, is Alibaba Cloud’s signature event that showcases the latest research, development and industry applications in the field of cloud computing.

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