Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Launched

Alibaba officially launched Aliyun, its cloud computing arm, laying the strategic foundation and initiating research and development efforts for all future cloud services, including distributed data processing platforms.

Significance

This marked the beginning of Alibaba's ambitious journey into cloud computing and directly paved the way for the internal development of powerful services like ODPS/MaxCompute, driven by a vision of self-reliance and massive scale.