Weighing Infrastructure Options

Guaranteeing good connectivity and well-distributed in-country infrastructure remains difficult for international providers.A number of Chinese cloud providers have emerged to offer AWS-like services inside the country, and there are some international providers with in-country offerings as well. That said, access to physical infrastructure is generally easiest when working with providers specialized in assisting international companies in China. Chinese providers do tend to have significantly better presence in the country than international providers, however.

Another issue is that Chinese cloud providers’ offerings are relatively immature. Often, significant limitations exist in features or functionality that we’ve come to expect from major international providers like AWS, Google or Microsoft. Compounding the issue, language barriers significantly impact the usability of Chinese cloud offerings.

So then, a careful cost-benefit analysis must be made when choosing from among the infrastructure options in China while trying to balance expenses, presence and functionality.

Going Local

Keeping as many elements of the application delivery stack in-country as possible is important so that developers and operators can overcome these challenges to improve delivery of applications to increasingly important Chinese audiences. These include:

• If content delivery networks (CDNs) are being employed, use local CDNs for Chinese traffic

• Use DNS networks with a Chinese presence

• Reduce the number of scenarios in which users have to “scale” The Great Firewall

Due to the challenges of connectivity, it’s important to keep users as local as possible.

Optimizing delivery across distributed infrastructure in China requires careful traffic management. You never want your users in China to transit the Great Firewall when they can instead interact with application infrastructure inside the country. And whenever you can, you want to ensure they’re serviced by infrastructure from a relatively nearby facility, with good connectivity to their ISP.

The primary online properties, which are trying to achieve efficient delivery, need to leverage traffic management technology delivered from within China to direct traffic across their in-country infrastructure.

Worth the Effort

Entering the Mainland China market isn’t easy, particularly from the technical standpoint, but the opportunity is significant. Fortunately, the tools for addressing many of the technical issues—such as modern traffic management solutions and public cloud infrastructure—are becoming more readily available.

As more companies make their move into China, the outcome of their efforts will be based on how well they serve this important audience. To do this well, they will need to deliver applications in China effectively – which can be accomplished by remaining as local as possible and choosing tools that address current technology limitations in the Land of the Red Dragon.