Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to open an infrastructure region in Hong Kong in 2018, making the city the eighth AWS Region in Asia Pacific.
AWS’ launch of the Hong Kong infrastructure region will allow Hong Kong customers to store their data locally, and to build flexible, scalable, secure, and highly available applications.
It will also enable Hong Kong customers to enjoy fast, low-latency access to websites, mobile applications, games, SaaS applications, big data analysis, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and more.
At launch, the new AWS Region will comprise three Availability Zones, said Alex Yung (pictured), corporate vice president and managing director of AWS Greater China, at the first AWS Summit hosted in Hong Kong today.
According to an AWS spokesperson, Availability Zones (aka AZs) are isolated locations and are what each Region is made up of. AWS has three locations in Hong Kong for its AZs.
“AZs allow customers to build highly available applications. They are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other AZs and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other AZs in the same region,” said the AWS spokesperson.
“AZs are made up of one, and sometimes more, datacenters. AZs are also designed in such a way that if one AZ were to fall off the face of the earth for some reason, the other AZs would continue to function normally. This means customers can build their applications across multiple AZs so they are designed to handle failure and continue to operate uninterrupted.”
Including Hong Kong, there will be eight AWS Regions in the Asia Pacific: Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, Seoul, and Mumbai, and an additional Region in China (Ningxia) which is expected to launch in the coming months. Together, these Regions will provide AWS customers with a total of 19 Availability Zones, and allow them to architect highly fault tolerant applications. (Click here to view AWS’ global infrastructure.)
In 2008, two years after AWS made its global launch, the cloud company opened a CloudFront Point of Presence (PoP) in Hong Kong to enable customers to serve content to end users with low latency. Since then, AWS has added two more PoPs in Hong Kong, the latest going live in 2016.
In 2013, AWS opened an office in Hong Kong which is staffed by a wide range of functions including sales, support, technology evangelists, and marketing.
“Hong Kong has a dynamic and vibrant business environment and is making progress toward becoming a digital city. An AWS Region here will enable our customers — from start-ups to large enterprises, and from financial institutions to government organizations — to enjoy cost and agility advantages across their entire IT operations, in compliance with local data regulations,” Yung said.
Nicholas Yang, secretary for Innovation and Technology, Hong Kong government, welcomed AWS’s plan to open an infrastructure region in Hong Kong in 2018,” AWS’s global infrastructure coming to Hong Kong reaffirms Hong Kong’s status as the prime location for setting up data center facilities in the region and also a recognition of Hong Kong’s edge and strengths as an Asia hub for doing business and a regional data hub.”
“The new AWS Region in Hong Kong will further accelerate cloud computing adoption and cloud-based system development in Hong Kong, facilitating the digital transformation of businesses in this city. Hong Kong is well-positioned to become a premier global data hub in the region. We will continue to promote our competitive advantages and encourage prospective operators to establish a presence in Hong Kong,” Yang added.