Second Australian AWS Region to open in Melbourne in 2022

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to open a second infrastructure region in Australia.

Scheduled to open in the second half of 2022, the new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will consist of three availability zones at launch. These will join the existing 25 availability zones in eight AWS regions across Asia Pacific in Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

Globally, AWS has 77 availability zones across 24 geographic regions, with plans to launch 18 more availability zones and six more AWS regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, in addition to the new region in Australia.

Amazon Web Services launched an Australian region in 2012.

"Since then, we've worked with hundreds of thousands of customers in Australia to accelerate their digital transformation from startups such as Canva and Atlassian to enterprises including Kmart and Telstra, and public sector agencies such as the CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Statistics," AWS Australia and New Zealand managing director Adam Beavis said.

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

See also: 400 global public officials call on Amazon to pay its dues

Beavis said in the past decade, Amazon has invested AU$3 billion in Australia including into infrastructure and its local workforce, which now sits at around 3,000 employees.

"The opening of the AWS Melbourne region demonstrates our ongoing commitment to Australia and the long-term potential we believe there is for our nation to be a leader in the digital economy," he added.

Speaking with ZDNet about the new region, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr said it would give customers additional flexibility and choice. He said the new region will be targeted at the company's entire range of customers.

"We have wonderful customers in all across Australia and there's really -- there wouldn't be a particular technical or business reason to say, 'Well, this region is set aside for this kind of customers and this other region is set aside for another kind', we would build them to the same standards, to the same scale, to the same security level, regardless of the kinds of use cases that our customers will put them to," Barr said.

"So in order to just give our customers as much flexibility as possible, they're open to all customers."

AWS in September last year launched a climate pledge to achieve net zero carbon output by 2040.

"Globally we have a goal to draw 100% of our energy needs from renewable resources by 2030 and we're on the path to do that by 2025," Beavis said on Tuesday.

To help the company achieve its goal, Amazon invested in two renewable energy projects in Australia.

"In total [they] will combine 165MW of capacity, enough to power 63,000 average Australian homes each year," Beavis added.

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