Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Foundation

Alibaba Group officially founded Alibaba Cloud, with Dr. Wang Jian as the chief architect, tasked with building a cloud computing platform from the ground up, starting with the Apsara distributed operating system.

Significance

This marked the official commencement of the project that would eventually yield ApsaraDB, shifting Alibaba's strategic focus towards self-sufficiency and innovation in cloud infrastructure.