Innovation is occurring everywhere at a rapid pace and it is important for AWS to continue to invest in infrastructure and services in places around the world where new ideas and technologies are being born. That is why I am excited to share that AWS will open a new infrastructure Region in Thailand. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region will create new opportunities for emerging companies to scale and existing businesses to reinvent themselves with cost-effective access to hardware, storage, and compute capacity.

Papyrus Studio is a great example of how the Thai media and entertainment industry is innovating in the cloud. With AWS, a small visual effects and animation company can scale their infrastructure 2x, 5x, even 10x in a matter of minutes without significantly increasing their costs. Time itself has become elastic.

From day one, Papyrus Studio decided to build their business on the cloud. AWS provided them with the flexibility to scale compute capacity based on the size or complexity of a specific project, and also provided access to physical hardware that would be cost prohibitive to purchase, run, and maintain on premises, such as GPUs. Most importantly, this setup allowed Papyrus Studio to collaborate with customers and freelancers located around the world.

Papyrus Studio is using a combination of services to scale compute capacity, including EC2, EC2 Auto Scaling, and EC2 Spot Instances. At peak, the studio can render up to 12,000 frames per month. In comparison, most companies that have on-premises infrastructure render 5,000 frames per month. That is a 140% percent increase in productivity.

With AWS, Papyrus Studio has also found a scrappy new revenue source. They are using EC2 Spot Instances to farm out rendering services to other studios without impacting their own projects.

EC2 Spot takes advantage of unused EC2 capacity at a heavy discount. Similar to on-demand, a single instance or fleet can be stood up and torn down within minutes. It is dead simple. The main difference with EC2 Spot, is its impermanence—an instance can be recalled with two minutes notice. And if you are worried about capacity, take for example, that on an average week, customers are using more compute capacity on EC2 Spot Instances than customers were running across all of EC2 in 2014. It is a perfect solution for stateless, fault-tolerant, flexible workloads. Papyrus Studio was able to scale 4x and save roughly 65%.

One of the first clients that Papyrus Studio served was a large film studio based in Thailand. With more than 1 million hours to render per year, the studio only had the on-premises capacity for 70%. With this new offering, Papyrus was able to render more than 150,000 hours for this studio in 2 months. Since the soft launch, demand for this service has grown 5x in just 9 months.

Customer stories like Papyrus Studio inspire us at AWS. The cloud can allow a small company to rapidly scale and compete globally. It also provides new opportunities to create, innovate, and identify business opportunities that just aren’t possible with conventional infrastructure.

I truly believe that making cloud services available to the greatest number of people democratizes innovation and allows anyone with a great business idea to be successful. With the upcoming AWS Region in Thailand, businesses of all sizes across all industries in Thailand will have access to the same cloud services, security, reliability, scale, and speed as the largest organizations in the world.