Amazon Web Services Inc. will open a new data center region in Hong Kong early next year, becoming AWS’s eighth cloud computing region in Asia Pacific.

The company currently offers regions in Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, Seoul and Mumbai, and is set to add a second Chinese region in Ningxia later this year.

“Together, these Regions will provide our customers with a total of 19 Availability Zones and allow them to architect highly fault-tolerant applications,” Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS, said in a blog post Monday. “Public sector organizations such as government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofits in Hong Kong will be able to use this Region to store sensitive data locally.”

AWS’s cloud infrastructure is organized around various “regions” and “availability zones.” A region equates to a geographical area that’s served by its data centers. Inside each of these regions AWS offers availability zones that are made up of one or more data centers. Each of these has its own redundant power, connectivity and networking capabilities housed in separate facilities. The AWS “U.S. East” and “Europe” regions, for example, both offer eight availability zones.

AWS says its availability zones are linked to each other through private fiber-optic networks so that customers can setup their applications to fail over automatically between zones when necessary to prevent any service interruptions. That means its customers can run things such as databases and applications with greater availability. It also makes them more fault-tolerant than is possible from a single data center.

In total, AWS currently offers 43 availability zones from 16 geographic regions. It has already announced plans to add another three regions and eight availability zones in China, France and Sweden by the end of next year.

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