Amazon live from Sydney data centre next week

Amazon Web Services' Equinix SYD3 cluster ready to go live.

Amazon Web Services will begin serving customers from its first Australian data centre on Tuesday, ending more than a year of speculation.

The cloud computing giant has data centres in the US, Brazil, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo and edge nodes in seven other European countries, China and Sydney.

Several sources told iTnews that it was moving hardware into Australian facilities late last year.

Amazon is understood to have established two facilities in Sydney, with its primary data centre in Equinix's SYD3 facility.

The Australian launch next week comes in advance of the global AWS customer and partner conference late this month.

Partners expected the launch to boost cloud computing uptake among Australian enterprises that demand lower latency and faced data sovereignty concerns.

Moving from services an existing AWS data centre to the Sydney facility could be achieved "within weeks", one said, rather than the months it took to move from a traditional environment to the cloud.

Suncorp, the Commonwealth Bank and Vodafone were tipped to be considering AWS' Australia-based offerings, with Suncorp Life chief information officer Fiona Floyd describing the platform-as-a-service model as a "game changer" at an FST conference this week.

Competitor Rackspace also will begin serving customers from an Australian data centre this year.

In August, Rackspace stated that the Australian facility would keep locally hosted customers' data under Australia law, and not overseas laws like the US' Patriot Act.

But Australian cloud computing provider Ninefold and its parent Macquarie Telecom have argued that the Patriot Act could apply to assets of US firms and their subsidiaries.

AWS did not respond to iTnews' requests for comment at the time of publishing.