Amazon Expands Cloud to AsiaPac With Sydney Site

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Amazon Web Services is expanding its worldwide coverage, launching a new AWS AsiaPac region in Sydney, Australia. This region launches with two availability zones so customers may use it for high availability applications.

This is AWS’ ninth region, and third Asia Pacific Region, accompanying Singapore and Tokyo. The company is also opening up offices in Sydney and Perth in support of the region, with local technical support operations being added in 2013 as part of its global network of support centers.

The new Sydney region supports Amazon’s EC2 and related services such as Elastic Block Storage, virtual Private Cloud, VM Import, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing. It also supports Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), Amazon DynamoDB, SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)…it’s a long list. AWS also has an exisiting edge location in Sydney for Route 53, a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service, and CloudFront, a web service for content delivery.

The new region provides low latency access to AWS services for those with customers in Australia and New Zealand. There is both a growing demand for cloud from Australian companies, as well as outside companies looking to deliver to the Australian market. For those outside companies, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels noted in his blog post ^[2] that using AWS is arguably an easier route for outsiders than finding and tracking a local hoster. He also noted that this has been highly requested by companies worldwide. The new AWS region is similar to existing regions, which means existing software deployed elsewhere on AWS can be quickly deployed here.

The region is also backed by a number of partners and local systems integrators. A number of members of the AWS Partner Network have been preparing for this launch. Some examples listed:

• Canonical, which is working to bring the official Ubuntu AMIs to our new Region.
• enStratus, whose cloud management platform is available in the new Region.
• RightScale‘s cloud management platform  is available in the new Region.
• Acquia, a hosted Drupal provider with over 2,400 customers,  are working to ensure that their service will be available to customers in the new Region.
• ESRI, a Geographic Information Systems provider with over one million users in more than 350,000 organizations, is making their ArcGIS platform available in the new Region.

“I have visited Australia at least twice every year for the past four years and I have seen first-hand evidence of the tremendous interest there is in the AWS service,” wrote Vogels. “Many young businesses as well as established enterprises are already using AWS, many of them targeting customers globally.”

AWS already serves over 10,000 organizations in Australia and New Zealand, and the new zone will be appealing to them, as well as others looking to get in the region.

In short, AWS already has a lot of adoption in Australia, and now it is set up in the region because of healthy demand. One of AWS’ Chief competitors Rackspace also sees opportunity in Australia, launching its first Australian data center through an agreement with Digital Realty Trust. The facility is located in Erskine Park in Western Sydney, and is expected to receive customers by the end of this year. Rackspace established an initial presence back in 2009, and the data center is its ninth global facility.

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[1] Image: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/clouds-data-dreamstime.jpg

[2] blog post: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/11/asia-pacifc-sydney-region.html

[3] Jason Verge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/jasonv/

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