Perth will be first Australian AWS Local Zones site

Australia’s first AWS Local Zones location has been announced, with Perth joining the 28 existing global sites. A further 23 are planned internationally, including one in Brisbane.

AWS Local Zones are infrastructure deployments that place the company’s offerings — including compute, storage, database and other services — near large population, industry and IT centres. This helps AWS customers deliver distributed edge and hybrid cloud applications that require single-digit millisecond latency — where cloud infrastructure location matters — to end users or on-premise data centres.

Under this arrangement, customers are able to run workloads with low latency requirements on AWS Local Zones while seamlessly connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS Regions (a geographic location where AWS clusters data centres to serve customers). While most customers’ workloads run in AWS Regions, on occasion, a region may not be close enough to meet low latency or data residency preferences.

Organisations have traditionally maintained these location-sensitive workloads on premises or in managed data centres that require customers to procure, operate and maintain their own IT infrastructure, and use different sets of APIs and tools for their on-premises and AWS environments.

AWS manages and supports AWS Local Zones, meaning customers do not incur the expense and effort of procuring, operating and maintaining infrastructure in various cities to support low latency applications. AWS Local Zones can also help organisations migrate additional workloads to AWS, supporting a hybrid cloud migration strategy and simplifying IT operations.

“AWS’s investment to launch its first Australian AWS Local Zones location in Perth is a big win for Western Australian organisations and the economy,” said the Hon. Stephen Dawson, Western Australian Minister for Innovation and the Digital Economy.

“An AWS Local Zones location in Perth opens up more opportunities for Western Australian businesses to innovate and develop new services enabling better experiences for their customers and our citizens. Having world-class cloud infrastructure here in Perth will drive our state’s innovation agenda and strengthen the diversification of our economy. We’re pleased that AWS’s continued investment in our state supports the next generation of innovators.”

The launch of the AWS Local Zones location in Perth gives customers the ability to easily deploy applications close to end users in the metro area. Having AWS Local Zones close to large population centres in metro areas enables customers to achieve the low latency required for use cases like video analytics, online gaming, virtual workstations, live streaming, remote health care, and augmented and virtual reality. They can also help customers operating in regulated sectors like health care, financial services, mining and resources, and public sector that might have preferences or requirements to keep data within a geographic boundary.

“We are pleased to deepen our investments in Western Australia by bringing the first Australian AWS Local Zones location to Perth,” said Sarah Bassett, head of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland Enterprise at AWS Australia.

“Speed matters in business, and we’ve designed AWS Local Zones to deliver low latency capabilities for organisations to improve the performance of their digital applications, process large amounts of data faster and drive productivity gains. The launch of AWS Local Zones location in Perth is a continuation of our investment to support organisations running all types of workloads by bringing secure, extensive and reliable cloud infrastructure closer to our customers.”

The launch of the AWS Local Zones location in Perth is the newest addition to AWS infrastructure in Australia, including the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, seven Amazon CloudFront edge locations, six AWS Direct Connect locations and the announced AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region.

Customers and partners welcome the launch

Curtin University, HBF, Mechanical Rock, Nearmap and Woodside Energy are among customers and AWS Partners welcoming the launch.

Curtin University is an Australian public research university, based in Perth, that supports more than 50,000 students.

“Curtin University is on a journey to build a cloud-based digital platform, powered by AWS, which will enable us to move out of our on-campus data centres to ensure we can take full advantage of digital services,” said Jason Cowie, Chief Information Officer at Curtin University.

“Flexibility is key in delivering the services and experiences that our staff and students require. An AWS Local Zones location in Perth gives us more choice in where we host our workloads — whether to bring cloud closer to our students using AWS Local Zones or supporting large-scale IT migrations across our global campuses using the AWS Region in Sydney. Today’s announcement brings us one step closer to operating 100% on AWS, while enhancing our security and operational resiliency.”

HBF is Australia’s second-largest, not-for-profit health insurer, providing hospital and ancillary insurance to approximately 1.1 million members nationwide.

“We have selected AWS as our cloud provider in our cloud-first strategy,” said Sanjeev Gupta, Chief Information and Transformation Officer at HBF.

“AWS enables us to innovate at pace, process data faster and enhance our service capabilities to benefit our large customer base in Western Australia and across Australia. The launch of the Perth AWS Local Zones location will help HBF to deliver future applications that require ultra-low latency.”

Mechanical Rock is a Perth-based IT consultancy and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that specialises in product development, modern data platforms and enterprise DevOps-focused transformation.

“[The] launch of AWS Local Zones location in Perth is a game changer for us and the services we’ll be able to offer local organisations,” said Hamish Tedeschi, founder and CEO at Mechanical Rock.

“AWS Local Zones will enable us to help more customers run latency-sensitive applications closer to their offices and sites, while addressing data residency preferences for our healthcare, financial services and government customers.”

Nearmap is a Perth-founded location intelligence company providing organisations with easy access to high-resolution aerial imagery, city-scale 3D content, artificial intelligence datasets and geospatial tools.

“We have compute-heavy artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads that would be challenging to run without the scalability of AWS,” said Dr Rob Newman, CEO and Managing Director at Nearmap.

“AWS helps us provide our customers with real-time access to petabytes of Nearmap location data instantly via the web and APIs. The AWS Local Zones location in Perth gives us more options to reduce latency to drive better user experiences for our customers in Western Australia accessing high-resolution aerial imagery and location data.”

Woodside Energy is a global energy company founded in Australia.

“Our digital twin solution, Fuse, allows us to create a virtual replica of our operations, pulling data from sensors, cameras and robots to help us make more informed business decisions,” said Ben Wilkinson, Chief Digital Officer at Woodside Energy.

“An AWS Local Zones location in Perth will give us the low latency capabilities we need for future Fuse use cases and help us continue re-imagining how our business can be operated more efficiently through the use of automation and digital twins.”

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