Alibaba Cloud’s Solana Infrastructure Push
Alibaba Cloud has rolled out new infrastructure specifically designed for Solana RPC nodes. The focus seems to be on cutting down latency, which makes sense for high-frequency trading and other time-sensitive blockchain interactions. They’re using their Elastic Compute Service in what they call a Cluster Placement Group, which basically puts all the nodes in a low-latency zone.
I think this move is interesting because it shows how traditional cloud providers are adapting to blockchain needs. The configuration they’re talking about uses 9th-generation dedicated host instances, which they claim are 20-30% faster than older versions. They mention Intel GNR CPUs and something called CIPU 2.0 that offers 200G dual-channel bandwidth.
Performance Improvements and Testing
What caught my attention were the performance numbers from their tests in Singapore. The getSlot RPC call latency dropped from 25 milliseconds to just 10 milliseconds when using Alibaba Cloud with ZAN. That’s a pretty significant improvement, honestly.
For larger data operations like the getBlock call with 4MB of data, latency went from 245 milliseconds down to 195 milliseconds. These improvements might not sound huge to casual users, but for trading firms and developers who need constant, fast access to blockchain data, every millisecond counts.
They’re also using elastic ephemeral disks that can handle up to 1 million IOPS and 4 GB/s per disk. These can achieve local drive speeds and scale across multiple instances, which gives some flexibility for Solana node infrastructure.
Network Advantages and Market Context
The RPC nodes connect through Alibaba’s backbone network, which means users can avoid public internet congestion. This should provide more stable connections 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.
This setup apparently minimizes hops between users and nodes too. 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, while maintaining a 99.9% on-chain success rate.
Broader Industry Movement
This showcase comes at a time when more institutions are looking at Solana’s trading capabilities. It follows the Solana Foundation’s Trade on Solana program, which aims to help professional trading companies access markets, data, and operational services. We’ve also seen SushiSwap expand to Solana recently, adding SOL token swaps and cross-chain trading.
Interestingly, despite these infrastructure developments, SOL’s price has dropped over 4.5% to trade around $80.52 at the time of reporting. That disconnect between technical progress and market performance is something I’ve noticed happening quite often in crypto.
The whole thing makes me wonder if we’re seeing the beginning of more enterprise-level infrastructure support for blockchain networks. Alibaba Cloud’s move could signal that major cloud providers are starting to take blockchain performance requirements more seriously, especially for networks like Solana that handle high transaction volumes.
