European-only alternative to Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) is the largest cloud provider in Asia and the third-largest globally. Alibaba Group Holding Limited is incorporated in the Cayman Islands but operationally and effectively controlled from China. The PRC National Intelligence Law (2017) Article 7 obliges Chinese organisations to "support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work" - which is the Chinese equivalent of the US CLOUD Act and arguably broader. The Frankfurt and London regions of Alibaba Cloud are EU-located but PRC-controlled. For EU buyers needing Schrems II-style sovereignty, Alibaba Cloud raises a third-country exposure that is legally even less defensible than US providers.

China (PRC) EU-only replacement stack 12 services mapped
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Provider
Alibaba Cloud
Headquarters
Hangzhou, CN
Jurisdiction
China (PRC)
Legal regime
PRC Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law, National Intelligence Law (Art. 7)

"EU region" is not sovereignty. Four questions decide it.

Data residency tells you where the bits sit. Sovereignty tells you which legal system can compel access. The answer must hold on all four - or the stack is not sovereign.

Residency

Where is the data physically stored?

Not "in the cloud" - which datacenter, in which country, under which jurisdiction.

Subprocessors

Who else is in your data path?

Every vendor that touches the data: the CDN, the email relay, the error tracker, the analytics pipe.

Jurisdiction

Whose laws can compel disclosure?

A US-headquartered provider falls under FISA 702 and the CLOUD Act - even when the bits sit in Frankfurt.

Key custody

Who actually holds the encryption keys?

If the cloud provider holds both the data and the keys, the data is readable by them - regardless of any DPA.

Fails AWS · Azure · GCP · EU region

Fails on jurisdiction and key custody.

EU bits, US-headquartered parent, US subprocessors in the default path, provider-managed keys.

Passes Binadit managed stack

Passes on all four.

EU-hosted on EU-headquartered infrastructure. Zero US subprocessors in the default path. Customer-held or EU-KMS keys. Listed by name in your Article 28 DPA.

Why teams are exiting Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud usage in EU mid-market is concentrated in specific patterns: cross-border e-commerce serving Chinese consumers, EU subsidiaries of Chinese parent companies, or companies that adopted Aliyun for genuinely China-specific compute and now find the EU side under regulatory pressure. The triggers we see for migration: EU customers (B2B) refusing data processing through Aliyun, NIS2 essential-entity classification flagging PRC providers as supply-chain risk, or board-level concern after the 2024 EU regulatory tightening on Chinese cloud and AI providers. The EU sovereign stack handles the EU-side workloads cleanly; China-specific workloads remain on a documented hybrid where appropriate.

Alibaba Cloud services and their EU-only equivalents

A migration is not "swap one box for another". The mapping below is what we run for clients leaving Alibaba Cloud on Schrems II grounds - full EU jurisdiction, no US parent in the data path.

Elastic Compute Service (ECS)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. KVM virtual machines on Debian or Ubuntu, provisioned with Terraform and configured with Ansible.
Engineering note
Standard VM migration. Image rebuild from CentOS/Aliyun Linux to Rocky/Alma/Debian. Most application stacks transfer without changes.

Object Storage Service (OSS)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. MinIO or Ceph RGW, S3-compatible.
Engineering note
OSS supports S3-compatible API; the migration is endpoint config plus data sync.

ApsaraDB RDS

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. PostgreSQL or MySQL with Patroni for failover and pgBackRest for point-in-time recovery.
Engineering note
RDS uses MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQL Server underneath; migration via logical replication or dump/restore depending on size.

Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Kubernetes on Debian or Talos, with Cilium networking and cert-manager for certificates.
Engineering note
ACK is upstream Kubernetes with Aliyun-specific addons; standard nginx-ingress and cert-manager replace ACK-specific equivalents.

Function Compute (FaaS)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Knative or OpenFaaS on your Kubernetes cluster.
Engineering note
Function migration is mechanical; runtime models port cleanly.

Server Load Balancer (SLB)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. HAProxy or Nginx, with keepalived for failover.
Engineering note
Standard L4/L7 load balancing on all EU options.

Anti-DDoS Pro

What we run instead
Binadit Private Infrastructure. Upstream volumetric filtering, with rate limiting and CrowdSec at the application edge.
Engineering note
Volumetric attacks are absorbed upstream of your servers. Application-layer abuse is handled where it can actually be understood, next to your traffic.

Web Application Firewall

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Coraza or ModSecurity with the OWASP Core Rule Set, plus CrowdSec for behavioural blocking.
Engineering note
Rule sets transfer; OWASP Top 10 coverage is standard everywhere.

CDN

What we run instead
We implement and operate an EU CDN for you: Bunny.net or KeyCDN, with Nginx and Varnish caching at your origin.
Engineering note
A CDN is one of the few layers we do not run ourselves. We pick the EU provider, configure cache headers, purge strategy and origin shielding, and operate it as part of the managed service.

Alibaba Cloud DNS

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. PowerDNS or Knot, authoritative, DNSSEC signed.
Engineering note
Standard zone migration.

Tablestore (NoSQL)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. MongoDB replica sets, or PostgreSQL with JSONB where the document model is thinner than it looks.
Engineering note
For wide-column workloads, ScyllaDB is the modern open-source pattern.

PolarDB

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Patroni-managed PostgreSQL failover across nodes, with automatic promotion.
Engineering note
PolarDB is MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible; logical replication handles the migration.

How we migrate off Alibaba Cloud

A typical mid-market migration runs in three phases. The numbers below assume a 6-10 person engineering team and a moderately complex application stack.

  1. Weeks 1-3

    Audit + traffic-region split

    Inventory Aliyun services and classify by traffic region: serving Chinese mainland users (may stay on Aliyun, document exposure for EU data), serving EU users (priority migration to sovereign EU stack). Output: phased plan with explicit boundary.

  2. Weeks 3-10

    EU-facing workloads cutover

    EU traffic gradually shifted to the EU sovereign stack. Database replicas pre-staged. Storage sync. Edge migrations to Bunny.net.

  3. Weeks 10-14

    Decommission EU side of Aliyun

    Final cutover of EU workloads. Aliyun account scoped down to China-mainland-only workloads if those remain. EU customer DPAs updated to reflect new processor list.

Aliyun-to-EU cost comparison varies more than US migrations. For pure compute, EU sovereign stack is competitive or cheaper. For Aliyun-specific managed services (PolarDB at scale, Tablestore), the migration may not be cost-driven but compliance-driven. The strongest case is regulatory: GDPR penalties for inadequate Schrems II-style safeguards on PRC providers can dwarf any infrastructure cost difference.

Frequently asked questions

View all frequently asked questions

What is the legal regime that makes Alibaba Cloud problematic for EU data?
Three primary instruments: the PRC Cybersecurity Law (2017) requires storage of certain data within China and grants government access; the Data Security Law (2021) extends data-handling obligations and allows extraterritorial application; Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law (2017) compels cooperation with state intelligence work. The combined effect is that PRC-controlled entities are required to provide access to data on government request. For GDPR purposes, this is a third-country transfer with high regulatory exposure.
But Alibaba Cloud International is registered in Singapore - does that change things?
Marginally. Alibaba Cloud Singapore is a subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding Limited (Cayman Islands) which is operationally controlled from Hangzhou. The same parent jurisdiction analysis that affects US subsidiaries applies here, with the additional consideration that PRC laws have explicit extraterritorial provisions.
We need to serve customers in mainland China - how does that work?
A documented hybrid: Aliyun (or another PRC provider) for China-mainland-served traffic, EU sovereign stack for EU-served traffic, with a strict boundary on personal data. The boundary is documented in the DPA and reviewed quarterly. Many of our cross-border e-commerce clients run exactly this pattern.
Are there sovereign EU alternatives for the China-specific services?
For services that exist specifically because of China-side traffic patterns (PolarDB-X for cross-region active-active in PRC, Aliyun CDN for mainland delivery), there are no EU sovereign equivalents because the use case is China-specific. For everything else (compute, storage, basic managed databases), the EU sovereign stack covers it cleanly.
How long does an Alibaba Cloud exit take?
For typical EU-side workloads (compute, RDS, OSS, ACK): 8-14 weeks elapsed time. For mixed cross-border workloads where the China side stays: 6-10 weeks for the EU-side migration only. The hybrid model often takes longer to design than execute.
What about Huawei Cloud or Tencent Cloud?
Same legal analysis as Alibaba Cloud. All three are PRC-controlled entities subject to the same combination of Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law and National Intelligence Law obligations. From a Schrems II perspective, the analysis is materially identical.

Plan your exit from Alibaba Cloud.

30-minute scoping call. We map your stack against EU-only alternatives, estimate the migration effort, and tell you whether it is the right call.

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