Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Foundation

Alibaba Group officially established Alibaba Cloud Computing, positioning itself to build the foundational cloud infrastructure (Apsara) and offer public cloud services. This marked the formal beginning of the journey that would birth ApsaraDB.

Significance

This event was the birth of the organization tasked with creating the distributed computing platform, 'Apsara,' upon which ApsaraDB would be built. It signaled Alibaba's long-term strategic commitment to cloud technology.