AWS Melbourne Region launches

AWS has launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region — the company’s second Infrastructure Region for the country. The move is part of an estimated AU$6.8 billion investment in Australia by 2037 and one that offers customers greater choice for running apps and serving end users from data centres located here in Australia.

“Australia has a strong history of technical innovation, and the launch of a second AWS Region in Australia provides even greater resilience and enables more customers to develop cloud-based applications that help fuel economic development across the country,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS.

“The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region adds to our ongoing infrastructure expansion and investments in Australia since we launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012. We are proud to deepen our investment by driving local job creation, building cloud skills, and creating opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS Partners,” he said.

The launch means AWS now has 99 Availability Zones across 31 geographic regions, with announced plans to launch 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand and Thailand. These Regions are composed of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region consists of three Availability Zones and joins the existing AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, which opened in November 2012. Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity and near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance.

The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will enable local customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in Australia while providing customers with even lower latency to drive greater productivity, more efficient business operations, and enhanced real-time application performance. Customers will also have access to advanced AWS technologies to drive innovation including compute, storage, networking, business applications, developer tools, data analytics, security, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The company also released an economic impact study estimating that its projected spending on the construction and operation of the new Region will support more than 2500 full-time jobs at external businesses annually, with a planned $4.5 billion (approx. AU$6.8 billion) investment in Australia by 2037.

The investment includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centres, operational expenses related to ongoing utilities and facility costs, and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses. These jobs, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications and other jobs within the country’s broader economy, will be part of the AWS supply chain in Australia. The construction and operation of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region is also estimated to add approximately $10.6 billion (approx. AU$15.9 billion) to Australia’s GDP by 2037.

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