Alibaba Cloud’s Solana Infrastructure Push
Alibaba Cloud has rolled out new infrastructure specifically designed for Solana RPC nodes. The focus here is on cutting down latency, which matters a lot for high-frequency trading and other time-sensitive blockchain interactions. They’re using their Elastic Compute Service in something called a Cluster Placement Group, which basically keeps all the nodes in a low-latency zone. I think this approach makes sense if you’re trying to shave milliseconds off transaction times.
They’re talking about their 9th-generation dedicated host instances being 20-30% faster than older versions. These use Intel GNR CPUs and have features like Elastic RDMA Interface and various Intel security services. There’s also this CIPU 2.0 thing that offers 200G dual-channel bandwidth. Honestly, the technical specs get pretty dense, but the gist is they’re throwing hardware at the problem to make things faster.
Performance Improvements in Testing
They ran tests in Singapore on bare metal servers. The results show some pretty decent improvements. For the getSlot RPC call, latency dropped from 25 milliseconds down to 10 milliseconds when using Alibaba Cloud with ZAN. That’s more than half the time, which isn’t nothing when you’re dealing with trading applications.
For the getBlock call with 4MB of data, latency went from 245 milliseconds to 195 milliseconds. That’s still a noticeable drop, though perhaps not as dramatic as the first example. Still, for developers and trading firms that need regular access to blockchain data, every bit of speed helps.
What’s interesting is they’re using elastic ephemeral disks that can hit up to 1 million IOPS and 4 GB/s per disk. These can achieve local drive speeds and scale across multiple instances. The flexibility here seems designed to let Solana node infrastructure grow as needed.
Network Architecture and Real-World Impact
The RPC nodes connect through Alibaba’s backbone network, which means users can avoid the congestion of the public internet. This should provide more stable connections with lower latency between clients and the Solana cluster. A company spokesperson mentioned they already have experience hosting RPC nodes and have shown how this works in production with their partner Zestem.
The setup also tries to minimize hops between users and nodes. Developers are advised to pick full nodes with the highest block height from a pool of over 100 active nodes. According to the data they shared, 80% of Solana transactions confirm in under two slots, which is about 800 milliseconds. The network maintains a 99.9% on-chain success rate, which seems pretty solid.
This whole showcase comes at a time when more institutions are looking at Solana’s trading capabilities. SushiSwap recently expanded to Solana, adding SOL token swaps and cross-chain trading in its interface. Meanwhile, SOL’s price has dropped about 4.5% to trade around $80.52.
I’m curious how much difference this infrastructure will actually make in practice. The numbers look good on paper, but real-world performance can be different. Still, having a major cloud provider like Alibaba focusing on Solana infrastructure suggests growing institutional interest in the network’s capabilities, particularly for trading applications where speed really matters.
