Melbourne home to AWS’ second region in Australia

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday said its second infrastructure region in Australia has been made available for customers.

The new region in Melbourne (codenamed: ap-southeast-4), which was first announced in December 2020, will consist of three availability zones.

Availability zones are the building blocks of an AWS region that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.

AWS had launched its first infrastructure region in Sydney in 2012, which also has three availability zones.

Other than the two regions, Australia is home to seven Amazon CloudFront Edge locations in Australia, backed by a Regional Edge cache in Sydney. The company had launched an additional CloudFront point of presence (PoP) in Perth in 2018.

While CloudFront points of presence are placed to ensure that popular content can be served quickly viewers, Regional Edge Caches are positioned (network-wise) between the CloudFront locations and the origin to further improve content performance.

AWS already has a local zone in Perth. Local zones are infrastructure deployment that provide compute, storage and database services to a large population or industry centers.

The new region in Melbourne will support more than 2,500 new jobs in the country, AWS claimed, adding that it plans to invest an additional $4.5 billion in Australia by 2037.

“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,” Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS, said in a press statement.

AWS customers in Australia include the likes of National Australia Bank, Littlepay, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Australian Bureau of Statistics.

AWS continues to invest in data centers

Melbourne is AWS’ 12^th region in the Asia Pacific region, joining existing regions in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Osaka, Jakarta, Hyderabad, Sydney, and Mainland China’s Beijing and Ningxia regions.

With the launch of the new Melbourne region, 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.

In November last year, the company launched its second region in India with a $4.4 billion commitment.

AWS also has 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.