Amazon Web Services plans to open a new cloud region in Australia in 2022, ten years after its services first became available there.

The new region will consist of three availability zones, raising the company’s total tally in Asia Pacific to 25. Other local cloud regions include facilities in Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

Australia
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Settling in down under

AWS Australia and New Zealand managing director Adam Beavis said that since the company first installed infrastructure in Sydney, “we've worked with hundreds of thousands of customers in Australia” including startups such as Canva and Atlassian, enterprises such as Kmart and Telstra, and public sector agencies including the CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

"They've all built and developed some incredible products and services."

Beavis said that the project will also help the company further its goals of achieving a zero carbon output by 2040, to which end it is planning to meet all of its energy requirements with renewable resources by 2030, as well as investing in two domestic solar projects which will endow it with 165MW of capacity.

The new infrastructure will also allow AWS to expand its provision to the Australian government, as last year it received a certification from the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), followed by a procurement deal allowing it to store highly sensitive government workloads.

The pandemic has led to an uptick in cloud infrastructure use, and especially so in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, both of which are geographically secluded from most major foreign markets.

One such customer is Zoom, which has been using AWS infrastructure since 2011, but saw its daily use rise from 10 million daily prior to Covid-19 to a peak of 300 million in April, according to founder Eric Yuan’s account to Entrepreneur Europe.

Zoom’s reliance on Amazon infrastructure caused a stir in the cloud community after rival Oracle claimed that it supplied most of the conferencing call software’s infrastructure, only to be debunked by Yuan, who said Amazon was Zoom’s “preferred cloud provider.”

While it is true that some of its operations run on Oracle’s cloud, the majority relies on AWS equipment, and will continue to do so after they signed a multi-year agreement last week.