AWS Zocalo comes to Sydney

Amazon Web Services has made its new Zocalo collaboration and file sharing service available in Sydney from today.

A representative for AWS announced the availability in the web services giant's developer forums (registration required).

Until today, local Zocalo users had been hosted in the Oregon region on the West Coast of the United States. 

An AWS spokesperson said offering Zocalo from AWS' local Equinix facility means Australian customers will be more able to comply with regulatory requirements governing where organisational and user data is stored.

The Sydney Zocalo location would also reduce latency for many users, the spokesperson said, but argued that while low latency was important, it was not critical for products like Zocalo.

"For web applications like Zocalo, latency is not a significant indicator of response times and pings are not an accurate way to measure application responsiveness," the spokesperson said.

In iTnews testing, the network latency for the Sydney location was around four and a half times lower than for Oregon.

Zocalo, launched in July this year, is AWS's attempt at snaring corporate customers with fully managed enterprise storage and file sharing.

The announcement of the Sydney-based offering comes after AWS last month substantially increased the per-file size limits on Zocalo, from 5GB to 5TB, and updated a range of mobile clients for the service.