As a company which has itself established a presence in Melbourne, Auckland headquartered managed services provider and software developer Lancom Technology has welcomed the introduction of an Amazon Region in Victoria’s state capital. An AWS Partner and a recent winner of an AWS Cloud Innovation Healthcare Industry award, Lancom says a second region in Australia further increases the appeal of AWS for its customers, while affirming the American company’s commitment to markets down under.

“While the internet runs at the speed of light, proximity still matters,” says Lancom CEO Waruna Kirimetiyawa. “Particularly with demanding workloads or those where response times truly matter, an additional Region means higher performance and greater flexibility. Combined with the AWS Asia Pacific Region in Sydney, the existing AWS Direct Connect location in Auckland, and the development of an Auckland Region scheduled for 2024, the new infrastructure in Melbourne has AWS demonstrating its commitment to Australasia. That helps partners like ourselves take the value proposition to market, while benefiting customers who enjoy continuous improvement from one of the biggest names in cloud computing.”

The AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region was introduced in 2012; the new location is known as the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region and joins 11 other APAC Regions in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Osaka, Jakarta, Hyderabad, Sydney, and Mainland China Beijing and Ningxia Regions.

Kirimetiyawa explains that AWS Regions are physical locations where Amazon clusters data centres for application and service delivery in AWS Availability Zones. Each Region is a separate geographic area, and features several Availability Zones which are multiple, isolated locations within each Region. Regions also provide extensions for other delivery options, such as AWS Local Zones. Local Zones provide customers with the ability to place resources, such as compute and storage, in multiple locations closer to end users.

AWS released an economic impact study estimating that the company’s projected spending on the construction and operation of the new infrastructure Region will create an annual average of more than 2,500 full-time jobs at local vendors through a planned $4.5 billion (AU$6.8 billion) investment in Australia in 2022–2037. AWS also estimates that the new Region will add $10.6 billion (AU$15.9 billion) to the Australian gross domestic product (GDP) by 2037.

The AWS Cloud has 31 geographic regions around the world, with close to 100 Availability Zones. Along with the addition of New Zealand next year, the company is planning additional Regions in Canada, Israel, Malaysia, and Thailand. The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region is the second infrastructure Region in Australia, in addition to the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, and the twelfth Region in Asia Pacific, joining existing Regions in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Osaka, Jakarta, Hyderabad, Sydney, and Mainland China Beijing and Ningxia Regions.

Kirimetiyawa says the more regions and Availability Zones a cloud offers, the better the reliability, performance and failover capability. “While outages are exceedingly rare, they can and do happen. The bigger and more widespread a provider’s physical infrastructure, the more resilient it becomes. In combination with the AWS Cloudfront Content Delivery Network which operates across Australasia and the world, the additional regions bode well for customers, partners and of course Amazon itself. We’re seeing increased demand for cloud solutions as customers look to reduce operating costs and take advantage of flexibility and reliability, and a bigger and better AWS is a key component in delivering their digital transformations.”

The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region went live early in 2023.