Alibaba's cloud computing service Aliyun announced that its data center in Silicon Valley has started trial operation and is providing cloud services to users in North America and around the world.

This is reportedly Aliyun's sixth data center, following those opened in Hangzhou, Qingdao, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen. It also means that Aliyun will start competing with Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure in the cradle of cloud computing. In addition, Aliyun plans to establish data centers in various markets around the world, including North America, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East.

But the creation of the American data center shows a double standard between Chinese and American laws and business practices. The Chinese offshoot of Alibaba can easily open a data center in the United States with limited worries about regulation, but a competitor like Amazon cannot participate in the same type of Internet Service Provider business in China because of China's anti-foreign business environment, its exclusion of foreigners in the ISP sector, and laws omitting Amazon and other non-Chinese businesses from engaging in the same type of Cloud Computing business. In fact, Amazon recently setup small cloud computing operations in China, but it did so via a third-party company, ChinaNetCenter.

Located in the Silicon Valley, Aliyun's data center meets the international Tier3+ standard. At present, this data center provides five kinds of cloud services, including cloud server, server load balancer, relational database service, cloud shield, and cloud monitor.

Users can customize their services based on demands on the official website of Aliyun and realize direct purchase. They will enjoy the same service guarantee as that offered in Hangzhou, Qingdao and Beijing. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley data center will connect with Aliyun's data centers in China, which allows users to manage their cloud applications in both America and China with a single account to achieve unified deployment and operation. In the future, Aliyun will launch more cloud computing and big data innovative services.

According to Yu Sicheng, Aliyun's vice president of international business, the reason for setting up the American data center is for user convenience. For Chinese companies that want to expand businesses in America, they can realize American website and mobile application deployment from China by a few clicks on Aliyun official website.