01
Client / Frontend
Where students and tutors interact
Partial
React
Next.js
TypeScript
Redux / Zustand
React Native
Swift (iOS)
Kotlin (Android)
Flutter
SSR via Next.js for marketing pages; native apps for parents in US, EU.
Vue.js
React
uni-app
Taro
WeChat Mini Program 微信小程序
Alipay Mini Program
Flutter
Mini Programs are huge — students/parents often enter the product through WeChat, never installing a separate app.
02
CDN + Edge
Global asset delivery, DDoS, WAF
Fully Divergent
CloudFront
Cloudflare
Akamai
Fastly
Aliyun CDN 阿里云CDN
Tencent CDN 腾讯云CDN
ChinaCache
Wangsu 网宿
CloudFront/Cloudflare are blocked or unreliable in mainland China — you must use a domestic CDN with an ICP license.
03
Cloud Provider
The underlying IaaS
Fully Divergent
AWS
GCP
Azure
Alibaba Cloud 阿里云
Tencent Cloud 腾讯云
Huawei Cloud 华为云
Baidu AI Cloud
AWS/GCP/Azure operate in China only through partnerships (AWS via Sinnet, Azure via 21Vianet) with separate accounts.
04
Orchestration
Container scheduling
Shared
Amazon EKS
GKE
AKS
Kubernetes
Helm
ArgoCD
ACK 阿里云容器服务
TKE 腾讯云容器服务
Kubernetes
KubeSphere
Rancher
05
API Gateway + Auth
Entry point, rate limit, identity
Partial
Kong
AWS API Gateway
Envoy
Auth0
Cognito
Clerk
Google / Apple SSO
Email + password, social SSO, magic links are the norm.
Aliyun APIGW
Spring Cloud Gateway
APISIX
Nacos 阿里
WeChat OAuth 微信登录
Alipay OAuth
Phone + SMS OTP
Phone number is the primary identity. Real-name verification is legally required.
06
Microservices
Business logic services
Partial
Node.js
Go
Python (Django / FastAPI)
Ruby on Rails
Java / Spring Boot
gRPC
REST
Polyglot is common — Node for edge APIs, Go for high-concurrency, Python for ML.
Java / Spring Cloud
Spring Cloud Alibaba
Dubbo 阿里
Go
Node.js
Sentinel (rate limit)
Seata (distributed tx)
Java + Spring Cloud is dominant. Dubbo (Alibaba's RPC framework) is common where ultra-low latency matters.
07
Real-Time Classroom
WebRTC video + whiteboard
Fully Divergent
LiveKit
Daily.co
Twilio Video
Zoom Video SDK
mediasoup
Janus
Yjs (whiteboard CRDT)
Excalidraw SDK
Agora 声网
Tencent RTC 腾讯云实时音视频
ZEGO 即构
Aliyun RTC
Netless (whiteboard)
Tencent TIW
Agora and Tencent RTC dominate because they operate edge nodes inside China — Western SFUs can't deliver sub-400ms latency through the Great Firewall.
08
Database
Transactional store
Partial
PostgreSQL (RDS / Aurora)
MySQL
MongoDB Atlas
DynamoDB
CockroachDB
MySQL
PolarDB 阿里云
OceanBase 蚂蚁
TiDB PingCAP
MongoDB
MySQL is overwhelmingly dominant; PolarDB and OceanBase are MySQL-compatible managed options. TiDB is the homegrown distributed SQL option.
09
Cache + Search
In-memory + full-text
Shared
Redis (ElastiCache)
Memcached
Elasticsearch
OpenSearch
Algolia
Tair 阿里 Redis 强化版
Redis
Aliyun Elasticsearch
Aliyun OpenSearch
10
Object Storage
Recordings, lesson PDFs
Fully Divergent
Amazon S3
Google Cloud Storage
Azure Blob
Aliyun OSS 对象存储
Tencent COS
Huawei OBS
Class recordings (huge volume) must be stored on domestic infrastructure per PIPL / cybersecurity law.
11
Event Bus + Queue
Async messaging
Partial
Kafka (MSK / Confluent)
Amazon Kinesis
SQS
RabbitMQ
Celery
RocketMQ 阿里
Kafka
Apache Pulsar
RabbitMQ
12
Workflow Orchestration
Batch jobs, payouts, reports
Partial
Apache Airflow
Temporal
Prefect
AWS Step Functions
Apache DolphinScheduler
XXL-Job
Airflow
Aliyun DataWorks
13
Data Warehouse + BI
Analytics, retention, LTV
Partial
Snowflake
BigQuery
Redshift
Databricks
Looker · Tableau · Metabase
MaxCompute 阿里
DataWorks
ClickHouse
Apache Doris
StarRocks
FineBI · QuickBI
14
Payments
Take money, pay tutors
Fully Divergent
Stripe
Adyen
Braintree
PayPal
Apple Pay / Google Pay
Tutor payouts via Stripe Connect, Wise, or Payoneer for global contractors.
Alipay 支付宝
WeChat Pay 微信支付
UnionPay 银联
Card payments are rare. Alipay + WeChat Pay together cover >90% of consumer transactions.
15
Notifications
Email · SMS · push
Fully Divergent
Twilio (SMS)
SendGrid · Postmark
Firebase Cloud Messaging
Apple Push Notification
OneSignal
Aliyun SMS
Tencent Cloud SMS
JPush 极光
Getui 个推
WeChat Service Notifications
FCM doesn't work on most Chinese Android phones — vendor push (Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO, Vivo) must be aggregated.
16
AI / ML
LLMs, speech, pronunciation
Fully Divergent
OpenAI (GPT, Whisper)
Anthropic Claude
Google Gemini
ElevenLabs (TTS)
Azure Speech
Hugging Face
Qwen 通义千问 · 阿里
DeepSeek
ERNIE 文心一言 · 百度
Hunyuan 混元 · 腾讯
Kimi 月之暗面
iFlytek 科大讯飞 (speech)
OpenAI is not available in China. iFlytek dominates Mandarin pronunciation scoring for English-learning use cases.
17
Identity / KYC
Tutor + student verification
Fully Divergent
Checkr (background)
Persona
Onfido
Stripe Identity
Aliyun Identity Verification
Tencent FaceID
Real-name + ID card lookup
Real-name verification against the national ID database is legally mandated for online services.
18
Observability
Metrics, traces, logs, errors
Partial
Datadog
New Relic
Sentry
Grafana + Prometheus
Honeycomb
CloudWatch
Aliyun ARMS
Tencent TAPM
Apache SkyWalking
CAT 大众点评
Sentry (self-hosted)
19
CI/CD + DevOps
Build, test, deploy
Fully Divergent
GitHub Actions
GitLab CI
CircleCI
Buildkite
Jenkins
Yunxiao 云效 · 阿里
Coding.net 腾讯
Gitee 码云
GitLab CE (self-host)
Jenkins
GitHub access from China is slow/unreliable; most teams use Gitee, internal GitLab, or vendor platforms.
20
Secrets + Security
KMS, vault, audit
Shared
HashiCorp Vault
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS KMS
1Password / Doppler
Aliyun KMS
Tencent KMS
HashiCorp Vault (self-host)