Amazon Web Services opens third Availability Zone in Asia-Pacific

In a bid to support the rapid expansion of the AWS customer base in the Asia-Pacific region, Cloud major Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday announced the opening of a third "Availability Zone" in Singapore.

The new Availability Zone will allow customers, who are already using AWS, with more choice, flexibility and even higher reliability.

"Availability Zones" refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability.

"AWS is increasing its commitment to the fast-growing Southeast Asia region by opening a third Availability Zone, so AWS customers have another local option where they can run mission-critical workloads and store data," Nick Walton, Managing Director, ASEAN, AWS, said in a statement. 

Start-up businesses to international corporations and public sector organisations are using the AWS Singapore Region to build and run their business in the AWS Cloud. 

"An enthusiastic base of customers across Southeast Asia have chosen to build their businesses on AWS because it offers more functionality than other Cloud platforms," Walton added.

AWS also provides "Amazon CloudFront" services at edge locations in Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Singapore for customers looking to deliver websites, applications and content to end users with lower latency.

"We are pleased that AWS is boosting its commitment to this region with the third Availability Zone, which will boost its resilience and help support growth of our digital platforms," said George Wang, Senior Vice President Information Technology, Singapore Airlines.

APN Partners across Asia Pacific also welcomed the expansion of the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. 

"This will allow customers in Singapore and across South East Asia to leverage additional capacity and flexibility to build scalable and highly available applications," added Varoon D. Rajani, CEO of BlazeClan Technologies.

AWS offers 51 Availability Zones (AZs) across 18 geographic regions in the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the UK.