The second AWS Region in Australia gives clients more alternatives to execute workloads with even higher availability and resiliency, store data securely in Australia, and serve end users with even reduced latency.
By 2037, it is anticipated that the new AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region would provide an annual average of more than 2,500 full-time employees with an investment of more than $4.5 billion (about A$6.8 billion) in Australia.
Hundreds of thousands of clients, such as ANZ, Littlepay, and RMIT University, utilize local AWS infrastructure to develop.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., today announced the inauguration of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, its second infrastructure Region in Australia. Developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and businesses, as well as government, education, and charitable organizations will have more options for hosting their apps and servicing end users from Australia-based AWS data centers beginning today. The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region plans to invest an estimated $4.5 billion (about A$6.8 billion) in Australia by 2037.
“Australia has a strong history of technical innovation, and the launch of a second AWS Region in Australia provides even greater resilience and enables more customers to develop cloud-based applications that help fuel economic development across the country,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS. “The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region adds to our ongoing infrastructure expansion and investments in Australia since we launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012. We are proud to deepen our investment by driving local job creation, building cloud skills, and creating opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS Partners.”
“We know how important access to secure cloud infrastructure is to Victorian businesses, and providing more choice will deliver a boost to the economy, support innovation, and help to create new jobs locally,” said Victorian Minister for Trade and Investment Tim Pallas.
AWS currently has 99 Availability Zones across 31 geographic locations with plans to establish an additional 12 Availability Zones and four AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand. AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones that position infrastructure in geographically diverse locations. The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region comprises of three Availability Zones and opened in November 2012 with the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. Availability Zones are positioned far enough apart to provide business continuity for clients, yet close enough to provide minimal latency for high availability applications that utilise several Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone includes its own power, cooling, and physical security, as well as redundant ultra-low latency networks. Customers of AWS that prioritise high availability can build their applications to operate in several Availability Zones for even better fault tolerance.
The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will enable local customers with data residency preferences to securely store data in Australia, while providing customers with even lower latency to drive greater productivity, more efficient business operations, and improved real-time application performance. Customers will also get access to sophisticated AWS technologies, including as computing, storage, networking, business apps, developer tools, data analytics, security, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, in order to facilitate innovation.
AWS also released an economic impact study estimating that the company’s projected spending on the construction and operation of the new Region will support more than 2,500 full-time jobs annually at external businesses, with a planned $4.5 billion (approximately A$6.8 billion) investment in Australia by 2037. The investment consists of capital expenditures for the building of data centres, operational expenses for ongoing utilities and facility charges, and purchases from area enterprises. The AWS supply chain in Australia will include construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and other employment within the country’s larger economy. It is predicted that the development and operation of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will contribute roughly $10.6 billion (approximately A$15.9 billion) to Australia’s gross domestic product by 2037.
Customers are enthusiastic about the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region.
Hundreds of thousands of Australian companies are among the millions of active AWS customers in more than 190 countries worldwide. Australia-based businesses using AWS to innovate and accelerate time to market. Airtasker, Animal Logic, ANZ Bank, Atlassian, Canva, Cochlear, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Jim’s Group, Kmart, Lion, Lovisa, National Australia Bank, Optus, PEXA Group, Pizza Hut, Smiling Mind, Swimming Australia, Target, Telstra, Ticketek, Woodside Energy, and Youfoodz are among the clients of AWS. AWS is utilised by clients in the Australian public sector to reduce costs and improve service to residents. These clients include FrontierSI, the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), the University of Melbourne, and the Victorian Land Registry Services. Brighte, FloodMapp, FrankieOne, Illuvium, Law On Earth, Littlepay, Mr Yum, Omniscient Neurotechnology (o8t), Reejig, and Swoop Aero are among the Australian companies utilizing AWS to rapidly grow their operations nationally and internationally.
ANZ Bank operates in 32 markets and provides banking and financial products and services to more than 8.5 million individual and commercial clients. “We intend to deploy our AWS-targeted workloads and applications through the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region on day one and want to make it our long-term primary AWS site,” ANZ’s group executive of Technology, Gerard Florian, stated. We anticipate that the new AWS Region in Melbourne’s lower latency and greater performance will help us improve the client experience and drive our cloud adoption.
Littlepay is a Melbourne-based financial technology business that collaborates with over 250 transport and mobility providers to provide contactless payments on local buses, municipal networks, and national public transportation systems. “Our mission is to create a universal payment experience around the world, which requires world-class global infrastructure that can grow with us,” said Amin Shayan, CEO at Littlepay. “To drive a seamless experience for our customers, we ingest and process over 1 million monthly transactions in real-time using AWS, which enables us to generate insights that help us improve our services. We are excited about the launch of a second AWS Region in Australia, as it gives us access to advanced technologies, like machine learning and artificial intelligence, at lower latency to help make commuting a simpler and more enjoyable experience.”
PEXA Group is Australia’s largest digital property settlement platform, which provides homebuyers and sellers with an efficient, dependable, and secure settlement experience. “Operational resilience is at the heart of our commitment to customers and our regulatory imperatives, which is why it is a top strategic priority at PEXA,” said Eglantine Etiemble, chief technology officer at PEXA Group. “The launch of a second AWS Region in Australia makes it possible for us to deploy applications securely across multiple Regions to improve the availability and performance of our PEXA platform and continue helping more than 20,000 families a week settle their homes sooner.”
RMIT is a public research university with over 96,000 international students.”The launch of an AWS Region in Melbourne gives us the additional capacity to assist researchers, students, and academics to deliver world-class research outcomes that benefit society,” said professor Calum Drummond, deputy vice-chancellor of Research and Innovation and vice president at RMIT. “We recently launched RMIT University’s AWS Cloud Supercomputing facility, known as RACE. RMIT researchers are using RACE to advance battery technologies, photonics, and geospatial science. The low latency and high throughput of the AWS Region in Melbourne, combined with our high-bandwidth private fiber network, will enable researchers and students to innovate beyond the limitations of traditional on-premises data centers.”
AWS Partners in Australia also welcomes the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region.
Tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) from across the world are members of the AWS Partner Network (APN). AWS Partners develop unique products and services on AWS, while the APN provides commercial, technical, marketing, and go-to-market assistance. AWS ISVs, SIs, and consultancy partners assist business and public sector clients in migrating to AWS, deploying mission-critical applications, and providing a comprehensive array of monitoring, automation, and management services for their cloud environments. Cevo, CMD Solutions, DiUS, IntelligenceBank, Local Measure, NCS, Stax, Unleash live, Urban.io, and Versent are examples of Australian AWS Partners.
Cevo is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that serves Australian firms such as David Jones, Insignia Financial, MYOB, and Jim’s Group with cloud services such as migration, data analytics, and managed services. “Working with AWS has enabled us to expand our team by more than 60 consultants in the past 12 months to meet increased customer demand for deploying highly-regulated cloud environments,” said James Lewis, CEO at Cevo. “As cloud adoption continues to scale, we’re seeing more customers—particularly in the financial, government, and retail sectors—move to the cloud to tap into advanced modernization and analytics capabilities to ideate, design and build new customer-focused services. With the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, we can enable customers to drive more experimentation at scale, while providing assurance that their data is stored securely in Australia.”
Dedicated to sustainability
As part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon has committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions throughout its operations by 2040 and is on track to power its operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of its initial 2030 goal. Amazon is the world’s largest corporate consumer of renewable energy, and as of 2021, the company’s operations utilized 85 percent renewable energy. In addition, AWS will be water positive by 2030, giving more water to communities than it consumes directly. Amazon has three assets in renewable energy in Australia, including a wind farm in Hawkesdale, Victoria, and two solar farms in Gunnedah and Suntop, New South Wales. When all three projects are operational, these renewable energy investments are anticipated to provide 717,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy per year, which is comparable to the annual electricity consumption of about 115,000 Australian households. Currently, Amazon has 57 renewable energy projects in the Asia-Pacific area.
