Alibaba plans to spin off cloud division within 12 months

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is aiming to spin off its cloud business within 12 months. Alibaba Group Holding said its board of directors has approved a spin-off of the Cloud Intelligence Group, via a stock dividend distribution to shareholders. The latest move follows the announcement in March that the company planned to …

[Grunchy]

I don’t like cloud

I don’t like relying on anything online. All of that stuff is just one single bit-flip away from catastrophic failure. The international cloud team could be the same group of mafia-hackers who’ve been trying to steal your same precious data for years, that you’re now willing to entrust to some unknown entity. At any second some calamity can befall whatever data warehouse you let yourself get swindled into trusting with anything.

Meanwhile I can buy old servers with dual 12-core cpus and hundreds of gb of ram for $30 apiece, and brand-new 5tb enterprise drives can be had for about $100. It truly is a case of “cheaper to buy than rent.”