Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened its first Australian Local Zone in Perth in a move to expand its footprint across key markets in the Asia-Pacific region.
As with all Local Zones, the local infrastructure will bring AWS compute, storage, database and other services closer to organisations in Western Australia that require single-digit millisecond latency for location-sensitive workloads.
Organisations have traditionally maintained such workloads on-premise, or in managed datacentres that require them to procure, operate and maintain their own IT infrastructure, and use different sets of application programming interfaces (APIs) and tools for on-premise and AWS environments.
With AWS Local Zones, organisations would not have to maintain infrastructure in different cities to support low latency applications, such as video analytics, virtual workstations and remote healthcare.
The service can also help them to migrate additional workloads to AWS, supporting a hybrid cloud strategy especially for those that operate in regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, mining and resources, and the public sector, which might have preferences or requirements to keep data within a geographic boundary.
“AWS’s investment to launch its first Australian AWS Local Zones location in Perth is a big win for Western Australian organisations and the economy”
Stephen Dawson, WA’s minister for innovation and the digital economy
“AWS’s investment to launch its first Australian AWS Local Zones location in Perth is a big win for Western Australian organisations and the economy,” said Stephen Dawson, Western Australia’s minister for innovation and the digital economy.
“An AWS Local Zones location in Perth opens up more opportunities for Western Australian businesses to innovate and develop new services, enabling better experiences for their customers and our citizens. Having world-class cloud infrastructure here in Perth will drive our state’s innovation agenda and strengthen the diversification of our economy,” he added.
The launch of an AWS Local Zone in Perth is the newest addition to AWS infrastructure in Australia, including the Sydney cloud region, seven Amazon CloudFront edge locations, six AWS Direct Connect locations, and the upcoming Melbourne cloud region.
Nearmap, a location intelligence company founded in Perth that provides access to high-resolution aerial imagery and geospatial data, noted that the new AWS Local Zone would provide more options to reduce latency to drive better user experiences for its customers.
“We have compute-heavy artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads that would be challenging to run without the scalability of AWS,” said Rob Newman, CEO and managing director of Nearmap. “AWS helps us provide our customers with real-time access to petabytes of Nearmap location data instantly via the web and APIs.”
For Woodside Energy, the AWS Local Zone in Perth will pave the way for future use cases of its Fuse digital twin, which replicates its operations and pulls data from sensors, cameras and robots to help it make informed business decisions, said Ben Wilkinson, its chief digital officer.
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