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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

Never used z.cn but saw a few neighbours ordering from them in Shenzhen. Probably recent tech books in English I guess. I did try AWS in China and it was absolutely shocking. Clearly they never prioritized China and the inevitable happened. I run a business in China, it's not easy but it's interesting.

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AWS in China is not run by AWS:

"To provide the best experience for customers in China and to comply with China’s legal and regulatory requirements, AWS has collaborated with China local partners with proper telecom licenses for delivering cloud services. The service operator and provider for AWS China (Beijing) Region based out of Beijing and adjacent areas is Beijing Sinnet Technology Co., Ltd. (Sinnet), and the service operator and provider for AWS (Ningxia) Region based out of Ningxia is Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co., Ltd. (NWCD)."

https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/

As an active user of AWS China, let me tell you that don't take those words at face value. AWS China business actually is growing really fast for past several years.

Sorry, which words do you mean?

It was when I used it in 2016. And they'd been there for years. And it was shit. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209227

Yeah your company needs government licenses to do anything in China. That's nothing new. Don't blame Amazon for that.

In amazonaws.cn there's no KMS and they only gave the ability to use virtual MFA devices at the end of 2017 [0]

All of this is to say nothing of the additional restrictions imposed by the government -- I agree with contingencies that it's "not easy" to run a business in (AWS) China, but I think that at this point everybody who's seriously thinking about doing so knows what to expect.

[0] https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/new/2017/now-add-additional-prot...

They offer KMS literally every region except China. No point in running a security/encryption service in China when they're just going to steal the keys.

The tragedy here is that the government isn't the only adversary. Without encryption, users are being left exposed to black hats who can get at the backend storage, either through hacking or through failure to securely decommission physical storage media.

AWS in China is, like, doing the best job that the government in China allows them to do. It's not very good. Almost everything that might provide an inconvenient security barrier to inspection is absent.

I heard AWS works in China, just not sure how well. Considering the GFW, I wouldn't have chosen it for projects serving Chinese users. Likely same consumer mentality is also playing a part against Amazon.cn and other foreign tech giants.

A local company bought a franchise for AWS from Amazon in China

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