Market share research from Gartner shows that Alibaba Cloud (a.k.a. Aliyun) is the #1 IaaS vendor in Asia Pacific with almost double the size of Amazon AWS which is second. Alibaba Cloud also boasts a #3 position worldwide, behind only Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. It has a very high density of datacenters in Asia Pacific and China, but it's more sparse in the rest of the world. In terms of feature set, it offers all the core services that you would expect from a major cloud vendor.

Recently, we noticed a considerable uptake in user requests for adding Alibaba Cloud support in Mist. Mist v4.1 delivers the first iteration. Now, our users are able to manage their Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) together with other public or private infrastructure from a single pane of glass.

More on Mist.io and Alibaba Cloud

Our work with Alibaba Cloud doesn't stop here though. We are happy to announce that Mist.io is a Technology Partner for Alibaba Cloud and in the future you should expect deeper integration and collaboration. Stay tuned!

Our experience with Alibaba's team has been very positive and we recommend to try it out, especially if you have workloads that need to run in APAC.

New users can sign up for a free trial.

Users with some initial exposure to Alibaba Cloud can leverage the Starter Package until October 10th, 2019. The Starter Package offers discounted rates across a number of services. More details and price comparisons to AWS can be found here.

Other updates in Mist v4.1

Some of our bigger customers are all-in self-service devops, e.g. SevOne. To make this happen in an organized way they need very fine grained control over who has access where.

Mist v4.1 adds another layer of such controls, enabling users to enforce Mist's RBAC policies to cloud locations. This feature is available in Mist Hosted Service (HS) and Mist Enterprise Edition (EE) which come with RBAC support out-of-the-box. RBAC on locations applies both to public clouds and private infrastructure. For example, account owners could now allow their teams to provision resources only on Alibaba ECS EU Central 1 (Frankfurt) availability zone A and vCenter Cluster 2.

Besides the above, Mist v4.1 includes several fixes and improvements. The most notable are:

• Support for volumes in Packet clouds.
• Support for new OpenSSH key format.
• Set filesystem type when creating volumes in DigitalOcean.
• Create and attach volume on OpenStack from the machine creation form.
• Support OpenStack API v2.2 & OpenStack Auth API v3.
• Update date picker in schedules.
• Fix editing of schedule script parameters.
• Fix tag editing in lists.
• Fix price retrieval for GCE Asia regions.

Conclusion

Alibaba Cloud support is the big new feature in Mist v4.1. This release also brings role-based access controls for cloud locations in private and public clouds. Finally, it includes several fixes and improvements for Packet, OpenStack, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine and OpenSSH.

Starting today, v4.1 is available on all Mist editions.

For a quick demo, reach out to demo@mist.io and arrange a video call with one of our engineers.