AWS to launch second Australian region in 2022

Amazon Web Services has unveiled plans for a second Australian cloud infrastructure region in Melbourne to improve resiliency and latency for its customers.

The hyperscale cloud provider on Tuesday said the new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region is expected to be ready for launch in the second half of 2022.

The planned Melbourne region will join AWS’ existing Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, which was launched back in 2012.

Like Sydney, the Melbourne region will consist of three availability zones at launch, bringing the total number of availability zones across the Asia Pacific to 28.

It is also expected to offer the same suite of 92 Information Security Registered Assessor Program (IRAP) certified AWS services currently offered in the Sydney region. 

A/NZ commercial sector managing director Adam Beavis said the region demonstrates the company’s “ongoing commitment to Australia” and its potential as “a leader in the digital economy”.

“Our second region in Australia will give AWS customers the ability to build applications with greater fault tolerance, resiliency and even reduce latency for critical cloud workloads,” he told media.

A/NZ public sector technology and transformation director Simon Elisha said the three availability zones would help reduce the risk of “business continuity being impacted by a single event”.

“Each availability zone has independent power, cooling and physical security, and is connected by ultralow latency networks,” he said.

“What this means is that AWS customers focused on high availability can design their application to run in multiple availability zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance.”

The new Melbourne region is expected to lead to the creation of 90 direct jobs over the first four years of deployment, building on Amazon’s existing workforce of more than 3000 employees.

“Those jobs will come in the form of data centre engineers, security engineers, operations engineers," he said.

Victoria’s Tim Pallas Minister for Economic Development welcomed AWS’ investment, with the new region to draw on the state's existing prowess around technology.

“The new AWS region will draw on our highly skilled talent, culture of innovation, and renowned capabilities in growing employment fields such as cloud computing,” he said.

 “Attracting companies like AWS will not only strengthen our world-leading tech reputation but contribute to our economic recovery.”