AWS extends reach with new datacenter region plan
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to open a new datacenter 'Region' in Hong Kong next year.
Amazon said this will be its eighth AWS Region in Asia Pacific after Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, Seoul, and Mumbai, with another Region in China -- Ningxia -- due to launch in the coming months.
"Together, these Regions will provide our customers with a total of 19 Availability Zones and allow them to architect highly fault-tolerant applications," said Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS.
"Public sector organisations such as government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofits in Hong Kong will be able to use this Region to store sensitive data locally," he added.
AWS builds its cloud infrastructure around these concepts of 'Regions' and 'Availability Zones'. A Region is a geographical area served by a number of datacentres, while inside each Region there are Availability Zones that consist of one or more datacenters, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. For example, the AWS 'US East' Region has eight Availability Zones, as does Europe.
Availability Zones are connected to each other with private fiber-optic networking, so customers can architect applications to automatically fail-over between zones without interruption.
This means AWS customers can operate production applications and databases with greater availability, and that are more fault tolerant and scalable, than would be possible from a single data center, the company said.
Currently AWS has 43 Availability Zones across 16 geographic regions with another three Regions and eight Availability Zones in France, China, and Sweden on the way by 2018.
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