Today, Amazon Web Services has greater worldwide coverage with the launch of a new AWS Region in Sydney, Australia. This new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region has been highly requested by companies worldwide, and it provides low latency access to AWS services for those who target customers in Australia and New Zealand. The Region launches with two Availability Zones to help customers build highly available applications.

I have visited Australia at least twice every year for the past four years and I have seen first-hand evidence of the tremendous interest there is in the AWS service. Many young businesses as well as established enterprises are already using AWS, many of them targeting customers globally. Cool ecommerce sites such as redbubble.com, big traffic sites such as realestate.com.au, innovative crowd sourcing with 99designs, big-data driven real-time advertising trading with Brandscreen, mobile sports apps by Vodafone Hutchinson Australia, big banks like Commonwealth Bank of Australia, these are just a small sample of the wide variety of companies that have been using AWS extensively for quite some time already, and I know they will put the new Region to good use.

But it is not only the Australian companies who frequently requested a local AWS Region, also companies from outside Australia who would like to start delivering their products and services to the Australian market are enthusiastic about serving Australia with low latency. Many of these firms have wanted to enter this market for years but had refrained due to the daunting task of acquiring local hosting or datacenter capacity. These companies can now benefit from the fact that the new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region is similar to all other AWS Regions, which enables software developed for other Regions to be quickly deployed in Australia as well.

You can learn more about our growing global infrastructure footprint at http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure. Please also visit the AWS developer blog for more great stories from our Australian customers and partners.