Sarah Bassett (Amazon Web Services)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has gone live with its first Australian Local Zones location in Perth.
This now marks 29 AWS Local Zones globally with plans underway to launch 23 more, including a location in Brisbane. Local Zones are an infrastructure deployment that contains AWS compute, storage, database and other services at the edge of the cloud.
The new Local Zone is designed specifically for key Western Australian industries including mining and resources, healthcare and public sector. Customers include the likes of Curtin University, HBF and Woodside Energy.
“Speed matters in business and we’ve designed AWS Local Zones to deliver low latency capabilities for organisations to improve the performance of their digital applications, process large amounts of data faster and drive productivity gains,” AWS WA, SA and QLD enterprise head Sarah Bassett said.
“The launch of AWS Local Zones location in Perth is a continuation of our investment to support organisations running all types of workloads by bringing secure, extensive and reliable cloud infrastructure closer to our customers.”
The Perth launch is the newest addition to AWS infrastructure in Australia, including the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney and Melbourne) Region, seven Amazon CloudFront edge locations and six Direct Connect locations.
Perth-based IT consultancy and AWS Advanced Consulting partner Mechanical Rock specialises in product development, modern data platforms and enterprise DevOps-focused transformation.
Founder and CEO Hamish Tedeschi said the new Local Zones location in Perth was a game-changer for them and the services it can offer local organisations.
“AWS Local Zones will enable us to help more customers run latency-sensitive applications closer to their offices and sites, while addressing data residency preferences for our healthcare, financial services and government customers,” Tedeschi said.
Perth founded location intelligence company Nearmap conducts compute-heavy artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads.
According to its CEO and managing director, Dr Rob Newman, that would be challenging to run without the scalability of AWS.
“AWS helps us provide our customers with real-time access to petabytes of Nearmap location data instantly via the web and APIs,” Newman said. “The AWS Local Zones location in Perth gives us more options to reduce latency to drive better user experiences for our customers in Western Australia accessing high-resolution aerial imagery and location data.”
In line with WA state government's Innovation Strategy – a 10-year technology-focused initiative launched last month – the AWS Local Zone in Perth will improve the performance of digital applications, process large amounts of data faster and drive productivity gains for customers.
Western Australia minister for innovation Stephen Dawson added AWS’ investment was a big win for Western Australian organisations and the 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," he said.
“Having world-class cloud infrastructure here in Perth will drive our state’s innovation agenda and strengthen the diversification of our economy.”
Woodside Energy chief digital officer Ben Wilkinson said the AWS Local Zones location in Perth will provide the low latency capabilities needed for future Fuse – Woodside's digital twin solution – use cases and help continue re-imagining how the business can be operated more efficiently through the use of automation and digital twins.
Curtin University CIO Jason Cowie said the Local Zones will bring it a step closer to operating 100 per cent on AWS.
“Curtin University is on a journey to build a cloud-based digital platform, powered by AWS, which will enable us to move out of our on-campus data centres to ensure we can take full advantage of digital services,” Cowie added.
"Flexibility is key in delivering the services and experiences that our staff and students require. An AWS Local Zones location in Perth gives us more choice in where we host our workloads – whether to bring cloud closer to our students using AWS Local Zones or supporting large-scale IT migrations across our global campuses using the AWS Region in Sydney.”
AWS manages and supports AWS Local Zones, meaning customers do not incur the expense and effort of procuring, operating and maintaining infrastructure in various cities to support low latency applications.
