Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Foundation & Apsara Project Initiation

Alibaba Cloud was formally established, and the ambitious Apsara distributed operating system project, led by Dr. Wang Jian, commenced to build a cloud infrastructure from the ground up for Alibaba's explosive e-commerce needs.

Significance

This marked the beginning of Alibaba's journey into cloud computing and laid the fundamental technical groundwork for all subsequent services, including ApsaraDB for RDS.