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AWS opens third availability zone in Singapore
Cloud service provider is upping the ante in a region that has been lapping up cloud infrastructure services to advance digitisation efforts
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened a third availability zone in Singapore, underscoring the growing appetite for cloud infrastructure services in Southeast Asia.
The cloud service provider said this week that the new availability zone will support the rapid growth of its customer base in the Asia Pacific region, and offer enterprises more choice, flexibility, and even higher reliability.
An organisation that requires a high level of fault tolerance, for example, can design applications to run in multiple availability zones, while those looking to deliver content and applications with lower latency can use Amazon’s CloudFront services at edge locations in Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Singapore.
Nick Walton, managing director of AWS in ASEAN, noted that Singapore’s third availability zone is the company’s response to demand from local customers and Amazon Partner Network (APN) partners.
“For many years, an enthusiastic base of customers across Southeast Asia have chosen to build their businesses on AWS because it offers more functionality than other cloud platforms, including a wide array of database, internet of things and machine learning technologies, as well as an extensive APN partner and customer ecosystem, and unmatched maturity, security and performance,” he said.
AWS customers such as Singapore Airlines welcomed the new addition. The premium Asian carrier currently hosts its Data analytics platform and mobile app on AWS, and will soon move its website to the cloud service.
“We are therefore very pleased that AWS is boosting its commitment to this region with the third availability zone, which will boost its resilience and help support growth of our digital platforms,” said George Wang, senior vice-president of information technology at Singapore Airlines.
AWS’s new availability zone in Singapore follows moves by other cloud service providers to establish or broaden their footprints in Southeast Asia in recent years.
Read more about cloud computing in ASEAN
- The Singapore government has been able to meet peak demands and address security issues through a cloud-based web-hosting platform powered by AWS.
- French IT service provider Orange rolls out public cloud services in the APAC region and plans to grow its workforce in Malaysia by 70%.
- Southeast Asian finance companies are adopting cloud technology with more caution than in other regions of the world.
- Businesses in ASEAN countries are slower to harness cloud computing than in other regions – but could overtake them, with much less legacy IT to deal with.
In June 2017, search giant Google opened a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Singapore during a launch event that saw Diane Greene, chief of Google Cloud, touting the technical advantages of GCP, such as analytics and machine learning.
In October 2017, Alibaba Cloud opened a new datacentre in neighbouring Malaysia to meet the surging demand for cloud computing services, adding to its growing footprint of datacentres in the Asia-Pacific region, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Australia.
According to the TechTarget IT Priorities 2018 survey, more respondents in Southeast Asia cited hybrid IT as a priority this year, representing a growth rate of 23% year on year. This will spur the demand for cloud infrastructure services, which one-third of respondents would prioritise over other datacentre infrastructure technologies in 2018.
