Amazon Cloud Data Center Opens In Australia

Amazon Web Services (AWS) already has a cloud presence in the Asia-Pacific region, with data centers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. But it's added another, its ninth region worldwide, in Sydney, Australia, where AWS has 10,000 customers.

Amazon will offer its full gamut of cloud services from that location, including Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service and Elastic Block Storage.

That means customers in Australia and New Zealand will receive lower latency services, according to AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post Monday.

That would be important for Amazon's CloudFront content delivery network, which must compete with Akamai and Edgecast Networks in worldwide service levels.

Barr said Amazon's customers include: Commonwealth Bank of Australia; Brandscreen, a startup advertising trading platform; MYOB, whose MYOB Atlas on AWS claims to put a business online in 15 minutes; and Halfbrick Studios, author of the Fruit Ninja online game that uses Amazon's DynamoDB and EC2 services to host millions of players.

[ Want to learn more about competing worldwide content delivery networks? See Dell, Edgecast Shake Up Content Delivery Networks. ]

The new service site will also host AWS's Route 53 domain name service, Barr said. Canonical will offer its Ubuntu as a building block for Amazon Machine Images, or virtualized workloads to be run in the cloud. Rightscale and EnStratus cloud management platforms will both be available to customers in the Sydney data center.

In addition, Acquia will provide open source Drupal content management services to its 2,400 customers in the region, Barr said.