Founding of Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun)

Alibaba Group establishes Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud) with a vision to build a scalable, secure, and reliable cloud computing platform to support its own ecosystem and eventually offer it to external customers.

Significance

This marked the genesis of the underlying infrastructure that would eventually give rise to CEN. The immense internal demands from Alibaba's e-commerce platforms would serve as the ultimate proving ground for its networking capabilities.