New Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in Australia - EC2, DynamoDB, S3, and Much More

It is time to expand the AWS footprint once again, with a new Region in Sydney, Australia. AWS customers in Australia can now enjoy fast, low-latency access to the suite of AWS infrastructure services.

New Region
The new Sydney Region supports the following AWS services:

• 
  A Tranquil Beach - Shoal Bay, Australia
  Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related services including Elastic Block Storage, Virtual Private Cloud, VM Import, VM Export, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing.
• Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR).
• Amazon DynamoDB.
• Amazon SimpleDB.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
• AWS CloudFormation.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS).
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).
• Amazon CloudWatch.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
• AWS Storage Gateway.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
• AWS CloudFront.
• Amazon Route 53.
• AWS Direct Connect.

We also have an edge location for Route 53 and CloudFront in Sydney.

This is our ninth Region; see the AWS Global Infrastructure Map for more information. You can see the full list in the Region menu of the AWS Management Console:

Customers
Over 10,000 organizations in Australia and New Zealand are already making use of AWS. Here's a very small sample:

• The Commonwealth Bank of Australia runs customer-facing web applications on AWS as part of a cloud strategy that has been underway for the past five years. The seamless scaling enabled by AWS has allowed their IT department to focus on innovation.
• Brandscreen, a fast-growing Australian start-up,has developed a real-time advertising trading platform for the media industry.They use Elastic MapReduce to process vast amounts of data to test out machine learning algorithms. They store well over 1 PB of data in Amazon S3 and add another 10 TB every day.
• MYOB uses AWS to host the MYOB Atlas, a simple website builder that enables businesses to be online within 15 minutes.  They currently have more than 40,000 small and medium-sized businesses using Atlas on the AWS cloud.
• Halfbrick Studios hosts the highly acclaimed Fruit Ninja game on AWS. They use DynamoDB and multiple Availability Zones to host tens of millions of regular players.

AWS Partner Network
A number members of the AWS Partner Network have been preparing for the launch of the new Region. Here's a sampling (send me email with launch day updates):

• Canonical is working to bring the official Ubuntu AMIs to our new Region. The latest supported images for Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS, 11.10, 12.04 LTS and 12.10 have been migrated over. Daily images have been turned on for the new region. The Amazon Quickstart list is also populated with the proper image ID's.
• The enStratus cloud management platform is available in the new Region.
• RightScale's cloud management platform (see my interview with RightScale CEO Michael Crandell to learn more) is available in the new Region.
• Acquia provides hosted Drupal (again, see my interview with Acquia's Tom Erickson to learn more) to over 2,400 customers. They are working to ensure that their service will be available to customers in the new Region.
• ESRI is the leading provider of Geographic Information Systems, with over one million users in more than 350,000 organizations. They are making their ArcGIS platform available in the new Region.
• The CloudBerry Labs S3 Explorer supports the new region.
• MetaCDN provides global cloud-based content delivery, video encoding and streaming services. They are working to ensure that their video encoding, persistent storage and delivery services will be available to customers in the new Region.
• Bulletproof launched Bulletproof Managed AWS in October, removing a significant barrier to AWS entry for enterprise and government customers that require enterprise management. Bulletproof's Managed AWS includes 24/7 proactive incident response, AWS Enterprise Support and 24/7 application and database management.

We already have a vibrant partner ecosystem in the region. Local Systems Integrators include ASG, Bulletproof Networks, Fronde, Industrie IT, The Frame Group, Melbourne IT, SMS IT and Sourced Group.

On the Ground
In order to serve enterprises, government agencies, academic institutions, small-to-mid size companies, startups, and developers, we now have offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. We will be adding a local technical support operation in 2013 as part of our global network of support centers, all accessible through AWS Support.

Listen to Andy
AWS Senior Vice President Andy Jassy will be speaking at our Customer Appreciation Day (November 13, 2012). You can register for and attend the live event if you are in Sydney, or you can watch the live stream from anywhere in the world.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Ameer Deen]

Congratulations and welcome to Australia, we couldn't be more excited :) !

[Oliver]

Excellent.

Now we just need the pricing calculator to be updated with the new location prices.

[Giri Fox]

It's such good news for Australia.

[Phil Hall]

Very excited... this will really make a big impact in Australia.

Although there are already others with local presence - the Amazon New Asia Pacific Sydney Region will become the tipping point for change and more rapid cloud adoption across Australian businesses. This will be game changer and all local infrastructure providers will be impacted - as this will bring more competitiveness in the industry.

Huge congratulations to all involved!

[Sakkraya]

long awaited. all in all its an excellent news!

[Elgin Lam]

Congrats, we've been waiting for you!

[ToM]

What about Glacier? I wonder why that service is not available?

[davidqhogan]

This is a huge moment for Australian business! Hopefully Adobe will release new AMIs for Adobe Media Server for the Syd region.

[Marc Bailey]

Welcome downunder, Amazon. Glad to be working with you at Macquarie University.

[Mark]

I worked on the CommBankAus project in '09 and glad to see that all the planning and proof of concept is coming to fruition.

[Andrew Chilton]

Hey Guys,

Great news for us New Zealanders (heh, and the guys in Aussie). And to celebrate, AwsSum has just had a new release which has support for AP_SOUTHEAST_2 - a.k.a. Sydney.

* http://awssum.io/

Thanks for coming to this side of the world. Looking forward to migrating my instances over in the near future.

Cheers,
Andy

[Ali]

Oliver, looks like the AWS cost calculator has still not been updated, you might find PlanForCloud useful. We always have uptodate prices from various clouds, including AWS Sydney.

[Rakefet Shohat]

Attunity CloudBeam enables huge uploads to S3, on-premise to S3 synchronization and replication between S3 regions. Now you can easily transfer your S3 files to the region closest to you…

Visit us at: http://www.attunitycloudbeam.com

[Hieu]

When will Redhat instances be available for AWS Sydney?