AWS launches new APAC region, Alibaba on top in IaaS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened a new cloud region based in Hong Kong, called the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region.

The launch means the company now spans 64 availability zones within 21 geographic regions around the world, with plans for 12 additional availability zones and four more AWS regions in Bahrain, Cape Town, Jakarta and Milan.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region is the eighth active AWS Region in the Asia–Pacific and mainland China, following Sydney, Beijing, Mumbai, Ningxia, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.

“Hong Kong is globally recognised as a leading financial tech hub and one of the top places where start-ups build their businesses, so we’ve had many customers asking us for an AWS Region in Hong Kong so they can build their businesses on the world’s leading cloud with the broadest and deepest feature set,” said Peter DeSantis, Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region offers three availability zones at launch. Availability zones have their technology infrastructure situated in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance between them to significantly reduce the risk of a single event affecting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications.

Each zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.

In related news, Gartner has ranked Alibaba Cloud number one in market share in the Asia–Pacific (and in the top three globally) in the IaaS and infrastructure utility services (IUS) sectors.

This is the second year running that Alibaba Cloud has come first in these sectors for the Asia–Pacific.

According to Gartner, Alibaba Cloud had 19.6% market share in 2018 in the Asia–Pacific for IaaS and IUS (a 4.7% gain from 2017). AWS and Microsoft came second and third with 11.0% and 8.0% respectively.

Alibaba Cloud has 15 availability zones in the region outside mainland China, covering Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Japan.

“It is very encouraging that our continued dedication to enabling cloud development across industries in both Asia–Pacific and globally has been recognised by the world’s leading research and advisory company,” said Lancelot Guo, Vice President of Alibaba Group and Head of Strategy and Marketing at Alibaba Cloud.

“As the only global cloud provider originated from Asia, we will continue to champion millions of businesses through our world-class infrastructure, advanced analytics tools and thriving ecosystem.”

Image courtesy Gartner.

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