AWS opens Melbourne region

AWS has lit up its second Australian infrastructure region, its long-awaited AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region.

When it first announced its plans for Melbourne in 2020, the company expected it to go live in the second half of 2022.

The company said it plans to invest around $6.8 billion in the Melbourne region by 2037, leading eventually to 2500 full-time jobs annually.

The Melbourne region follows a long way behind AWS’s original entry into the Australian market, the Sydney region which launched in 2012.

The region consists of three availability zones, infrastructure in distinct geographic locations located far enough from each other that they can deliver business continuity while providing low latency to customers using multiple zones.

“Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks," AWS said in a statement.

The Melbourne region also provides a new option for customers with data residency preferences. 

Services available from the Melbourne region include “compute, storage, networking, business applications, developer tools, data analytics, security, machine learning, and artificial intelligence”, the company said.

Earlier this month, AWS announced what it called a local zones location in Perth.

Local zones deliver compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services from a single physical location.