Alibaba Cloud rolls out cloud computer, delivery robot, at annual fete

Alibaba Cloud has launched its first cloud computer, a palm-sized personal computer which, despite being just about 60 grams, promises high-performance computing thanks to back-end cloud resources.

By connecting the cloud computer with a normal computer screen, a user can access almost unlimited computing resources while paying on a subscription model or for the actual cloud consumption.

Through Alibaba Cloud’s app-streaming protocol, which is designed for synergy between the cloud and the device, users can also purchase and access licensed apps and programs both Linux and Windows as well as various office applications. All user data is stored on the cloud. Available initially for enterprise customers, the cloud computers will be also available for purchase by individual consumers soon, the company says.

The cloud computer is just one of the products Alibaba Cloud unveiled at its annual Apsara Conference.

Alibaba Cloud also unveiled its autonomous logistics robot for last-mile deliveries. Developed by the Alibaba DAMO Academy, the research initiative by Alibaba Group, the delivery robot can carry 50 packages at one time and cover 100 kilometres on a single charge. It is estimated the mobile robot should be able to deliver as many as 500 packages a day to one designated community or campus, meeting the rising demand for speedy last-mile delivery in China.

Online shopping is booming in China, with 200 million packages delivered daily and expectations that will rise to 1 billion packages per day in the coming years.

A range of other cloud-native products was unveiled during the Conference:

Cloud Lakehouse: This is a big data architecture that can deliver significant data-based values and intelligence through cross-platform computing, intelligent cache, hot/cold data separation, storage improvement and performance acceleration.

Sandboxed-Container 2.0: Alibaba’s cloud-native container service for Kubernetes supports clusters that provide sandboxed container runtimes. The new Sandboxed-Container 2.0 enables customers to run applications in lightweight sandboxed environments with faster speeds and reduced cost of runtime resources.

PAI-DSW 2.0: The latest Cloud-native Machine-learning Interactive Development Platform by Alibaba. It aims to provide an optimal environment for developers that is easy to use, compatible with community plug-ins and supports multi-development environments like JupyterLab，WebIDE and Terminal.

Lindorm: The cloud-native multi-model database that is used to support the Alibaba Group ecosystem, is introduced to benefit the wider Alibaba Cloud ecosystem. Lindorm is a cloud-native database, with affordable storage and flexible processing characteristics. It is designed for applications with massive processing requirements for a mixture of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data.