Amazon Web Services announced today its fifth extension of the global cloud computing platform, this time heading again towards the Asia Pacific region, namely Tokio, Japan after last year’s launch in Singapore. The AWS Basic Support is free of charge and is available to all clients, business and non-business. For a more demanding class of clients, Amazon offers the AWS Premium Support in Japanese for prices between $49 and over $15,000 a month.

Among existing customers of the AWS in Japan there is Mitsui & Co, a Japanese giant activating in several industrial areas, gumi Inc., one of the largest social gaming companies in Japan that built their websites almost entirely on AWS and Zynga, the world’s largest social game developer.

“Today, AWS powers hundreds of thousands of customers in over 190 countries around the world, including individual developers, startups, government agencies and enterprises,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services.

“More and more, companies are realizing that they can use AWS to save significant capital, innovate faster, accelerate their pace of technology delivery, and focus their scarce engineering resources on what differentiates their business rather than on infrastructure. AWS is already being used by many companies in Japan, and with single digit millisecond latency in most instances to end users in Japan from our new Tokyo Region, we expect that to accelerate.”

In order to better serve future clients in terms of money and costs, AWS will help IT staff to move virtual machines to the AWS cloud with a new plug-in for VMware’s management platform, the Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector. Similar features will be offered by AWS in the future, such as including an export feature that will allow users to create a virtual machine from an EC2 instance and support for more operating systems. Regarding other recent services added by AWS, we must mention CloudFormation, a service free of charge that prompts a customer to describe in text the kind of server, network bandwidth, storage, and related services sought and then automatically provisions those resources.