Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on Tuesday that its second infrastructure region in Australia is now available to customers.
Melbourne’s new region (codename: ap-southeast-4) was first announced in December 2020 and will consist of three Availability Zones.
Availability Zones are the building blocks of AWS Regions, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.Gateway di edge computing
AWS launched its first infrastructure region in 2012 in Sydney, which also had three Availability Zones.
In addition to these two regions, there are seven Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Australia, powered by a regional edge cache in Sydney. The company launched an additional CloudFront point of presence (PoP) in Perth in 2018.
CloudFront points of presence are placed to ensure that popular content is served to viewers quickly, while regional edge caches sit between the CloudFront location and the origin (network-wise) to further improve content performance.
AWS already has a local region in Perth. A local zone is an infrastructure deployment that provides computing, storage, and database services to a large population or industrial center.
AWS claimed the new Melbourne precinct would provide more than 2,500 new jobs in the country, adding that it planned to invest an additional $4.5 billion in Australia by 2037.
“The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region adds to our continued infrastructure expansion and investment in Australia since launching the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012. We are proud to be supporting the industry by driving local job creation, building cloud skills, and AWS infrastructure services “And create opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS partners,” Vice President Prasad Kalyanaraman said in a press statement.
AWS customers in Australia include institutions such as National Australia Bank, Littlepay, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
AWS continues to invest in data centers
Melbourne is AWS’s 12th region in the Asia-Pacific region, joining the existing Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Osaka, Jakarta, Hyderabad, Sydney, and Beijing and Ningxia regions in mainland China.
With the launch of the new Melbourne region, AWS now has 99 Availability Zones across 31 geographic regions, and announced plans to launch 12 more Availability Zones and four additional AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand.
In November last year, the company launched its second region in India with a $4.4 billion commitment.
AWS also confirmed plans to invest $35 billion in Virginia by 2040, expanding its US-EAST-1 region by establishing multiple data center campuses across the state and creating 1,000 new jobs.