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> There's a lot to be said about improving quality of Chinese hardware and software, but it's definitely not up to western quality levels yet. Anecdotally, las

> There's a lot to be said about improving quality of Chinese hardware and software, but it's definitely not up to western quality levels yet. Anecdotally, last year I worked for an Asian company which had an office in Shenzhen. They were not able to compete with western tech, in part because they didn't understand the benefits of cloud computing. They wanted to own all their own hardware and it really slowed down software development. I also got the sense that most primary source programming resources are in English (stack overflow, etc.), and that unless your English was pretty good you might have a hard time keeping up with newer techniques. I think this will improve with time.

desdiv 10y ago
Cloud computing in China is a total shit show: 1. Go with a foreign cloud provider which has horrible latency thanks to the Great Firewall, and could get permanently blocked any time at the whims of the government. 2. Go with one of the big Chinese tech companies (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), where it's almost guaranteed that they will steal your idea/code/data, clone your product, and rely on their massive size and network effect to destroy you. They didn't get big through innovation like Western tech companies; they got big by stealing and government-backed monopoly. 3. Go with a smaller Chinese tech company that has reliability problems and could go belly up at any time.
- matthewrudy 10y ago
  We use AWS.cn for our service. But found out last week that AWS doesn't actually have a license, and piggybacks on some third party provider in beijing. http://m.baidu.com/news?tn=bdbjbody&bjaid=392506&bjdomain=lanjingtmt& http://m.baidu.com/news?tn=bdbjbody&bjaid=392506&bjdomain=la...
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    I think all the western cloud providers work like this; e.g. Azure in China. It isn't really that they can't get a license, but getting a license requires a certain amount of exposure to Chinese law that many western companies can't take on.
    - matthewrudy 10y ago
      I guess that's true. But it wasn't something we'd considered properly. Gives us more of a reason to move to a Chinese provider for our CN servers. (This is now simpler as we're standardizing on Kubernetes for deployments, so Kubernetes on AWS.cn vs Kubernetes on Aliyun should be equivalent)
      - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
        The idea is that the technology is constant at least. Also, tech support often goes along with it.

desdiv 10y ago

Cloud computing in China is a total shit show: 1. Go with a foreign cloud provider which has horrible latency thanks to the Great Firewall, and could get permanently blocked any time at the whims of the government. 2. Go with one of the big Chinese tech companies (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), where it's almost guaranteed that they will steal your idea/code/data, clone your product, and rely on their massive size and network effect to destroy you. They didn't get big through innovation like Western tech companies; they got big by stealing and government-backed monopoly. 3. Go with a smaller Chinese tech company that has reliability problems and could go belly up at any time.

matthewrudy 10y ago
We use AWS.cn for our service. But found out last week that AWS doesn't actually have a license, and piggybacks on some third party provider in beijing. http://m.baidu.com/news?tn=bdbjbody&bjaid=392506&bjdomain=lanjingtmt& http://m.baidu.com/news?tn=bdbjbody&bjaid=392506&bjdomain=la...
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  I think all the western cloud providers work like this; e.g. Azure in China. It isn't really that they can't get a license, but getting a license requires a certain amount of exposure to Chinese law that many western companies can't take on.
  - matthewrudy 10y ago
    I guess that's true. But it wasn't something we'd considered properly. Gives us more of a reason to move to a Chinese provider for our CN servers. (This is now simpler as we're standardizing on Kubernetes for deployments, so Kubernetes on AWS.cn vs Kubernetes on Aliyun should be equivalent)
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      The idea is that the technology is constant at least. Also, tech support often goes along with it.