Aliyun OSS
Alibaba Cloud's S3-compatible Object Storage Service — the dominant object store across mainland China. Standard bucket/key data model with regional clusters spanning the East Data West Computing corridor (coastal hot tiers, western cold/training tiers).
Summary
Alibaba Cloud's S3-compatible Object Storage Service — the dominant object store across mainland China. Standard bucket/key data model with regional clusters spanning the East Data West Computing corridor (coastal hot tiers, western cold/training tiers).
Aliyun OSS is the silent majority of Chinese AI training storage in 2026 — the substrate for DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and Alibaba's own Qwen training runs. From the index's perspective it's the China-side counterpart to AWS S3: same role, different jurisdiction, mutually unreachable.
- "S3-compatible" coverage is good for read/write/multipart/lifecycle but not feature-complete with AWS extensions (S3 Tables, Vectors, Metadata, Files have no Aliyun equivalents at parity).
- Aliyun's international regions exist but are secondary; PRC-domestic regions are the architectural focus and the only ones that meet China Data Localization for PRC-citizen data.
- Cross-cloud replication to/from non-Alibaba providers is regulatorily fraught — a CAC review may be required for export of "important data."
- AWS SDK v2's default
STREAMING-UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD-TRAILERchunked encoding does not work against OSS — Apache Iceberg and Polaris must be configured to fall back toSTREAMING-AWS4-HMAC-SHA256-PAYLOADor to disable chunked encoding entirely. This bites teams porting v2-SDK lakehouse stacks to OSS without changing their default request signing. - The
ossfsFUSE driver looks like a POSIX mount but lacks hard links, extended attributes, and robust file locking. Use CPFS for any metadata-heavy or training-pipeline mount; reserveossfsfor sequential-read or admin scripting. - April 2026 brought a +4.6 to +5.6% price hike on infrequent-access and archive tiers — Standard tier held flat. Storage budgets built on pre-hike prices need a refresh; Standard is now the most cost-stable tier for hot data.
Pricing posture: Five tiers from Standard ~$0.017/GB-month down to Deep Cold Archive ~$0.0011/GB-month — the lowest archival tier on the public market.
AI ecosystem position: OSS is the storage substrate for Panjiu AI Infra 2.0. CPFS layers POSIX semantics on top with sub-1ms metadata; HPN 8.0 RDMA networking removes the bottleneck for distributed training. Qwen 3 was trained on this exact stack, which is part of why Aliyun's hyperscaler position in China is reinforcing rather than declining.
implementsS3 APIenablesEast Data West Computing — the storage substrate of the strategysolvesChina Data Localizationscoped_toSovereign Storage
Definition
Alibaba Cloud's S3-compatible object storage service (Object Storage Service), the dominant object store across mainland China. Provides the bucket/key/object data model and S3-API compatibility, with regional clusters explicitly placed inside the **East Data West Computing** corridor — Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen for hot reads, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia for cheap-power compute and bulk training storage. Native integration with Alibaba's PolarDB AI Lakehouse, Hologres, and the Qwen training pipeline.
US export controls and the Cybersecurity Law of the PRC together force Chinese AI workloads onto domestic infrastructure that cannot route through AWS S3. Aliyun OSS is the primary S3 implementation that DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and Alibaba's own Qwen team train against — making it the silent majority of open-weight model training storage in 2026.
S3-compatible storage for Chinese-domiciled AI training, multi-region object storage inside mainland China, Alibaba Cloud-native lakehouse and ML pipelines, regulated workloads requiring data residency under PRC law.
Connections 9
Outbound 8
scoped_to3implements1Inbound 1
depends_on1Resources 5
Alibaba Cloud's official OSS product page covering pricing tiers, storage classes (Standard/IA/Archive/Cold Archive), and the regional availability footprint.
OSS API reference and developer guide — the ground truth for S3-compatibility scope and the OSS-specific authentication signing scheme.
Operation-level documentation showing which AWS S3 API operations are supported, including multipart upload behavior and lifecycle rule semantics.
The canonical workaround for the AWS SDK v2 `STREAMING-UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD-TRAILER` incompatibility — required reading for anyone porting Iceberg/Polaris/Spark v2-SDK stacks onto OSS.
CPFS (Cloud Parallel File System) overview — the POSIX layer over OSS that Qwen 3 was trained against, and the architectural template for "object storage with sub-1ms metadata for training pipelines."