About Corey QuinnOver the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.TranscriptCorey: Welcome back to Networking In The Cloud, a special 12 week mini feature of the AWS morning brief sponsored by ThousandEyes. This week's topic, The Cloud in China, but first, let's talk a little bit about ThousandEyes. You can think of ThousandEyes as the Google maps of the internet, just like you wouldn't leave San Jose to drive to San Francisco without checking which freeway to take because local references are always going to resonate the best when telling these stories, business rely on ThousandEyes to see the end to end paths that their applications and services are taking from their servers to their end users, to identify where the slowdowns are, where the pile ups are, and what's causing these issues. They can use ThousandEyes to figure out what's breaking and ideally notify providers before their customers notice. To learn more, visit thousandeyes.com. And my thanks to them for their sponsoring of this mini series.Now, when we're talking about China, I want to start by saying that I'm not here to pass judgment. Here in the United States, we're sort of the Oracle cloud of foreign policy, so Lord knows that my hands aren't clean any. Instead, I want to have a factual discussion about what networking in China looks like in the world of cloud in 2020. To start, China is a huge market. The market for cloud services in China this year is expected to reach just over a hundred billion dollars. So there's a lot of money on the table, there's a lot riding on companies making significant inroads into an extremely lucrative market that is extremely technologically savvy.Historically, according to multiple Chinese cloud executives who were interviewed for a variety of articles, China's enterprise IT market is probably somewhere between five to seven years behind most Western markets. That means that there's a huge amount of opportunity for companies to be able to make inroads and make an impact on that market before it winds up being dominated, like a lot of the Western markets have been by certain large Seattle-based cloud providers, ahem, ahem.Now, due to Chinese regulations, in order to run a cloud provider in China, it has to be operated by a Chinese company. That's why Microsoft works with a company called 21Vianet, whereas AWS has two partners, Beijing Sinnet and NWCD. Those local partners in fact own and operate the physical infrastructure that the cloud providers are building in China and become known as the seller of record. Although the US cloud companies of course do, or at least ostensibly retain all the rights to their intellectual property, either trademarks, their copyrights, etc.That said, if you take a look at any of the large cloud providers, service and region availability tables, there's very clearly a significant lag between when services get released in most regions and when they do inside the mainland China regions. Some of the concern, at least according to people off the record, comes down to concern over intellectual property theft. And in the current political climate where we have basically picked an unprovoked trade war with China, it winds up complicating this somewhat heavily. If for no other reason, then companies are extremely skittish about subjecting what they rightly perceive to be their incredibly valuable intellectual property to the risks of operating inside of mainland China, so on the one hand they don't want to deal with that. On the other, there are over half a billion people in China with smartphones, just shy of 900 million people on the i