Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Hangzhou, China. It is the largest cloud provider in Asia-Pacific and the fourth largest globally by market share. Alibaba Cloud offers over 100 products and services including elastic computing, object storage (OSS), content delivery networks (CDN), relational and NoSQL databases, and AI platforms. It serves as the core infrastructure for Alibaba's e-commerce operations, including the annual Global Shopping Festival (Double 11), which generates record-breaking traffic levels. Alibaba Cloud certifications are structured into three tiers — ACA (Associate), ACP (Professional), and ACE (Expert) — covering domains such as cloud computing, big data, AI, cloud security, and cloud native technologies.