Running Internet Systems in China - The Details You Need to Succeed in Chinese Internet Operations

Running Internet Systems in China
Build & Manage Servers - Optimize & Manage Servers - Managed Cloud Servers Copyright © 2015 ChinaNetCloud
ChinaNetCloud
2015
RUNNING INTERNET SYSTEMS IN
CHINA
The Details You Need to Succeed in Chinese Internet Operations

1. Overview
2. Country Proﬁle
3. Hosting Outside of China
4. Internet Data Centers
5. Bandwidth
6. Physical Servers
7. Clouds
8. Security Issues
9. Regulatory Environment
10. Ecosystems and Services
Chinese Internet
Infrastructure and Challenges

OVERVIEW
There are a lot of misconceptions about how the Internet
actually works in China.
China’s Internet has it’s own set of unique problems such as
regulatory, legal, infrastructure, connectivity, etc.
In this presentation we will examine the modern Chinese
Internet, it’s structure, challenges, and how to succeed in the
world’s most populous country.

COUNTRY PROFILE
• By mid-2014 there were 632 million Internet users in China
growing about 10% per year with a 47.5% penetration rate.
• 525 million of them were using mobile devices.
• There were 300 million who shopped over the Internet, a
growth of almost 50%.

MAP

HOSTING OUTSIDE OF CHINA
• China’s overloaded and congested networks make high-
performance hosting outside of the country next to impossible.
• Split systems are common, one for domestic and one for
international users.
• If there must be a single system, then Hong Kong presents a
good location with solid connections both in and out of China.
• When hosting in a foreign datacenter your site could still be
blocked due to regulatory challenges if anyone else is hosting
prohibited content.

INTERNET DATA CENTERS
• China’s Internet Data Centers are generally quite small and
often severely power-limited, with often only about 2,000
watts available per rack.
• Quality and environment vary wildly, from being housed in
part of an old ofﬁce building, to new green-facilities.
• Note that enterprise data centers from companies such as
AT&T and GDS are quite active and offer ﬁrst-tier facilities
and services, including higher power densities.

Connectivity
• An IDC’s most important asset is its connectivity to the
Internet, which can vary widely in quality and price.
• A Single-Line IDC is the simplest and cheapest option. It
connects to a local carrier but doesn’t provide good service
cross-country.
• A Dual-Line IDC provides a connection to the local carrier
plus an additional purchased line to the ‘other’ carrier.

Service Quality and BGP, or a lack there of
• Dual-Line systems don’t use the BGP protocol for routing.
• This means that each public device must have two or more
IPs and properly handle the default routes.
• BGP is the obvious solution, but is uncommon due to cost
and inter-carrier cooperation requirements.
• The best IDCs offer 8-line BGP to all of the major carriers,
an expensive but effective solution.

Challenges
• IDCs have many unusual challenges such as heavily
restricted access and poor quality staff with limited working
hours.
• Lower-tier IDCs will even ask difﬁcult customers to leave,
especially victims of frequent DDoS attacks or legal issues.
• All access to IDCs during sensitive periods can be severely
restricted, meaning no hardware changes or reboots even
during crashes, failures, or outages.

BANDWIDTH
ISPs / Carriers and The North-South Split
• Most areas of China only have a single dominant carrier for all
local Internet access.
• China Netcom serves most of the north and northeast, Beijing,
Tianjin, Shandong, and Shaanxi.
• In the south, China Telecom provides service to more than 50%
of the country’s population while other ISPs serve the needs of
the more rural areas.
• Carriers are not single entities, they often have separate
companies for each province or city, and don’t always cooperate.

BANDWIDTH
The Young and Mobile China
• The university network, CERNET, is separated and quite
difﬁcult to reach without special attention using the best-
connected data centers and CDNs.
• College students are a valuable demographic, making this
network a priority for some brands.
• The sizable mobile population is separated and difﬁcult to
reach, though recent mergers are making this easier.

CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORKS
• Several Chinese ﬁrms dominate the CDN market, such as
ChinaNetCenter, ChinaCache, Fast Web, and especially
Aliyun with their 8-line CDN service.
• Chinese CDNs are mostly standard and similar to the West,
lacking some features but adding others such as anti-link
stealing, media download prevention, etc.
• Generally all websites should utilize a CDN, especially when
reaching mobile or university users is important.

PHYSICAL SERVERS
• Server hardware is plentiful and easily obtained, with
excellent 24x7 service support in major cities.
• Efﬁcient 1-2U servers are the most common, with blade
equipment rarely seen due to power constraints.
• SANs aren’t so common, while F5 and Netscaler dominate
the high-end load balancer area.
• Most hardware is purchased outright, though a few IDCs do
offer leasing arrangements.

CLOUDS
Overview
• China is steadily catching up as cloud computing increases
in popularity around the globe.
• There are now several local players both big and small with
the end goal of becoming the Amazon of China.
• Services are often patterned off of AWS, but only provide a
selection of what is available in the West.
• Private clouds are increasingly common, however the
expertise to design and build them is in short supply.

CLOUDS
Problems
• Chinese cloud infrastructure is still early stage and
inexpensive, with quality and stability varying wildly.
• The use of pre-paid service plans limit possibilities and
requires companies to plan well in advance.
• Aliyun, Tencent, and QingCloud offer BGP connections, but
others are often only single or dual line connected making
bandwidth a challenge.
• Advanced features such as mountable storage, queues, and
autoscaling are less mature and must be used with care.

CLOUDS
Public Clouds
• Public cloud adoption has been hampered by the poor
reliability and service reputations of the various popular clouds.
• While some concerns are true, many are also due to user error.
• Cloud servers are ﬂexible and inexpensive, but are harder to
operate with less tolerance for faulty code or databases.
• To improve this, the largest clouds such as Aliyun offer
ChinaNetCloud’s audit, optimization, and management
services to help end customers improve and run their Internet
systems.

CLOUDS
Private Clouds
• The private cloud model is becoming increasingly popular to
those with the technical capabilities to design, build, and
manage such systems.
• These small and mid-sized systems provide excellent
utilization, ﬂexibility, and cost-efﬁciency.
• Larger systems involving hundreds of physical servers
based on OpenStack are slowly being built, with many more
coming in 2015 as the trend progresses.

CLOUDS
Hybrid Clouds
• Hybrid clouds are a combination of on-premises servers with
a cloud platform.
• True hybrid systems such as those offered by Rackspace or
AWS are not yet in China.
• The adoption of OpenStack may improve this, but it is still a
few years before customers and clouds can properly support
this model.

SECURITY ISSUES
Overview
• Security is a serious concern in the Chinese Internet, though
less so than in the West.
• Malicious activities do occur, but not at the rate or
sophistication of international attacks.
• Consumer PCs have extraordinarily poor security, often
having illegal software that has never been updated.
• As electronic payments are very common, banking systems
have excellent security often involving hardware tokens.

SECURITY ISSUES
Hackers and DDoS Attacks
• Hackers are certainly active and often target back-end
infrastructure.
• SQL injection attacks are quite common, as well as
uploading malicious imagery.
• These attacks are often made worse by bad coding
practices, limited testing, rapid development cycles, and a
priority on features over security.

SECURITY ISSUES
Hackers and DDoS Attacks
• DDoS attacks are most common, often carried out for fun,
ransom, or even for anti-competition.
• These attacks can reach sizes of tens of Gbps or more and
often have considerable resources in play.
• Carriers don’t cooperate as they do in the West leaving most
IDCs defenseless.
• The best IDCs have DDoS protection, and services similar
to CloudFlare such as AnQuanBao have come online to
further help manage these attacks.

REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT
Licensing / Internet Content Provider Registration
• China has a complex regulatory environment for Internet
companies.
• Any system serving data over HTTP is required to register
with the local government.
• This is simple, but does take time and can only happen after
a business license is issued.
• A basic registration is easy to get and is meant for most
standard websites.

REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT
Licensing / Internet Content Provider Registration
• eCommerce, gaming, news, and multimedia sites have
additional licensing requirements.
• Video sites need approval from SARFT, while gaming sites
need approval from the Ministry of Culture (MoC).
• Mobile applications, APIs, and aggregators are a grey area
and require negotiation with the IDC.

ECOSYSTEM & SERVICES
Website Monitoring
• Many global services are available such as Gomez, which
offers a variety of services in-country.
• Network Bench, a local ﬁrm, is especially good at monitoring
local CDNs, carrier, and last-mile details.
• These services are costly, so choose a mix between
monitoring level, cities, and frequency for better cost control.

Website Content Controls
• Within the ICP and data center agreements is a provision
that bans all websites from hosting prohibited content.
• This is controversial from a Western perspective as it forbids
content that would usually be allowed elsewhere.
• For most this isn’t a problem, however some users will
exploit any opportunity to upload and write problematic
content.

Website Content Moderation
• Adult content is by far the most commonly seen, followed by
the listing of weapons and drugs, rarely political.
• Government regulators and IDCs have very little tolerance
for any problematic content and will often just turn off
offending servers.
• Careful monitoring, reporting, and moderation is critical.
• A good IDC relationship helps prevent turn-offs, but all sides
generally take a cooperative stance in this area.

Website Development Services
• China has many development companies offering a broad
range of features, pricing, and quality.
• Code quality is especially a problem in China, as these
teams often have little knowledge of performance and
security related issues.
• This can cause databases to fail months later under heavy
load, necessitating costly and difﬁcult repairs.

RUNNING INTERNET
SYSTEMS IN CHINA
For more information and to download
our Running Internet Systems in
China white paper, please visit:
www.ChinaNetCloud.com

ABOUT CHINANETCLOUD
Founded in Shanghai in 2008, ChinaNetCloud is one of
the world's largest Internet Managed Services provider.
Our focus is on server operations, especially Reliability,
Performance, Scale, Security, and Cost Savings.
www.ChinaNetCloud.com

Running Internet Systems in China - The Details You Need to Succeed in Chinese Internet Operations

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Running Internet Systems in China - The Details You Need to Succeed in Chinese Internet Operations