Alibaba Cloud seeks to fuel the growth of Web3 by offering the platforms and tools it believes developers will need to get their apps to market faster. The Chinese cloud provider also hopes to be part of Singapore’s roadmap to move its government services to a commercial cloud environment, which currently encompasses Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Alibaba earlier this year established a team focused on furthering its Web3 strategy in its international markets, outside of China. Efforts here included improving its infrastructure, products and services, and partners to support customers’ transition to Web3 applications, said Raymond Xiao, Alibaba Cloud’s head of international industry solutions and architecture.

The Chinese cloud provider believes that Web3 development is driven by blockchain and immutable ledger technologies, with proponents like the metaverse and social gaming building on public or private blockchains.

Alibaba’s Web3 game spans four key areas, including cloud-native and blockchain development, and builds on its blockchain infrastructure as its underlying foundation. His primary goal here is to support developers on their Web3 journey, giving them the tools they need to get agile and get new applications to market faster.

This meant launching products like Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes and serverless technologies, Xiao said in an interview with ZDNET, adding that its Web3 portfolio currently includes more than 20 serverless services, as well as smart contract and private key management tools. .

A new blockchain node service will also launch next quarter, allowing Web3 developers to access different blockchain protocols, including Avalanche and Polygon, he said.

Available only to customers outside of China, the PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering will help reduce operational and maintenance time for Web3 developers, who traditionally have to build and maintain each node. The new blockchain node service is API-based, he added.

Emphasizing that Web3 was still evolving and its development at an early stage, Xiao said Alibaba would need to continue to monitor customer requirements and ensure that the underlying technology it offered was in line with market demand.

This would focus on the need to quickly build applications on the blockchain, he said, adding that Alibaba would look to push more API services and developer toolkits to support this.

Looking to support the Singapore government cloud movement

The Chinese cloud provider also expressed strong interest in participating in Singapore’s efforts to move its government services to cloud platforms.

Singapore, in late 2018, laid out a five-year roadmap to move most of its on-premises IT systems to commercial cloud platforms, as it sought to speed up delivery and improve the quality of government services for its population. Called Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC), the strategy aims to provide government agencies with a framework for adopting the commercial services offered by cloud providers.

The roadmap is currently in its second phase, which the Singapore government says will seek to leverage existing cloud-native capabilities and enable product teams to deliver “faster and more secure” government digital services at reduced costs. There are currently over 600 e-government services on GCC, including Whole of Government Application Analytics and MyCareersFuture.

GCC 2.0 was generally available on AWS in May of this year, and Azure was added to the list last month. Google Cloud Platform is scheduled for general availability next year. Other than the three, no other cloud providers have been announced for integration into the GCC 2.0 roadmap.

Alibaba Cloud expects this to change in the near future, and its Singapore CEO Derek Wang has expressed interest in collaborating with the government on the GCC. Adding more providers to the mix was instrumental in giving users more choice, Wang said.

He told ZDNET that Alibaba was already working with government agencies here on other initiatives, including projects involving data and artificial intelligence (AI), but was unable to provide details due to confidentiality clauses.

With a growing interest in ESG (environment, social, governance), he said the Chinese cloud provider was also helping organizations in Singapore with their net zero carbon emissions strategies, such as running water cooling technology for green data centers. This would further support the government’s goal of driving sustainable development and achieving net zero emissions.

Wang added that Alibaba’s research arm Damo Academy has a team in Singapore working on various capacities, including natural language processing (NLP), which could provide speech translation services for the public sector.

Xiao also pointed to Alibaba’s experience in providing e-government services in China and other global markets, offering use cases that could be implemented in Singapore.

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