Amazon Web Services Inc. said today that its second cloud infrastructure region in Australia has opened its doors to customers. The announcement came as the company promised to invest an additional $4.5 billion in the country over the next decade.

AWS announced the new region, ap-southeast-4, back in December 2020. It’s based in Melbourne and consists of three availability zones, which are the building blocks of an “AWS region” that places infrastructure in separate and geographically distinct locations to ensure resiliency against outages.

The company’s presence in Australia dates back to 2012, when it announced its first infrastructure region in Sydney, which also has three availability zones.

Besides the two cloud regions, AWS also has seven Amazon CloudFront Edge locations in Australia, as well as a single Regional Edge cache located in Sydney. The CloudFront Edge locations do the job of ensuring that popular content and media can be served up to local viewers quickly, while Regional Edge Caches are positioned between those locations to bolster those resources.

In addition to those deployments, AWS also operates a Local Zone in Perth on the west coast of Australia, providing additional compute, storage and database services to businesses in the vicinity.

Amazon said in a press release that the new Melbourne region will add more than 2,500 jobs, and that those will increase in the years to come as it invests an additional $4.5 billion in the country through 2037.

“We are proud to deepen our investment by driving local job creation, building cloud skills, and creating opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS Partners,” said AWS Vice President of Infrastructure Services Prasad Kalyanaraman.

The new cloud infrastructure is needed, Amazon said, because it has lots of significant customers in the country that it needs to support. They include the National Australia Bank, Littlepay Ltd., the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Looking at the wider region, Amazon said the new Melbourne facility is its 12th region overall in Asia Pacific. It joins existing regions in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Osaka, Jakarta, Hyderabad, Sydney, Beijing and Ningxia.

With the Melbourne region now open for business, AWS now operates 99 availability zones across 31 geographic regions. The company is constantly expanding its cloud footprint though, and has plans to open 12 more availability zones across the world, plus four new AWS regions slated for Canada, Israel, New Zealand and Thailand.

In addition to those plans, AWS has also confirmed that it will invest $35 billion in the U.S. state of Virginia by 2040 in order to expand its existing US-EAST-1 region. The company intends to build multiple data centers across the state, and has said it will create about 1,000 new jobs in the process of doing so.

Photo: Tony Webster/Flickr