AWS has finally chosen Singapore for Asian availability zone

AWS

The Cloud Has Landed!

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/11/12/aws-asia/

This courting must be at least 5 years long. 5 years ago when I was working there I was already trying to hook up the infrastructure guys with some of the data center operators in Singapore. The conversation was long, and that time it was overshadowed by the positivity of the acquisition of Joyo in China. Later I learned that the choice was very hard, between the major cities and hubs, especially Tokyo whete amazon.co.jp operates (where is amazon.com.sg??) or Hong Kong / Beijing where Joyo operates.

And still, through some magic and perhaps some tribal song and dance, AWS finally chose Singapore, at least as a start. That concludes the holy trinity of US (east and west coast), Europe (near Dublin, Ireland) and Asia that’s required to hold the fort around the world.

What does this mean? Put this together with the rise of Asia, growth of sophistication of Asian enterprises and start-ups to use more and more cloud servics, that would mean an explosion of traffic from Singapore. As the AWS business model promotes its “unlimited” capacity, it will definitely need to pre-provision sufficiently, which spells big bucks to data center operators, telcos, and other infrastructure providers. Want to sell electricity to Amazon?

More importantly, this is probably going to be a big vote albeit all the limited natural resources that this island-state has to offer. Like, it’s impossible to spend the land to build data centers like these (e.g. Google in Oregon) or have a hydro electric dam (Bakun Dam is pretty close though…)

For folks eager to start looking at how to take advantage of availability zones, this looks like an interesting article to start with, or just learn it from AWS’s feature guide.

However, this can also be a threat to the local cloud infrastructure operators, as startups might consider pairing AWS cloud infrastructure and the promised NGNBN to cheaply deliver their new inventions. Amazon also promises to go to other locations in the region.

May the best cloud bring rain and thunder to Singapore!

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