Amazon AWS Adds Singapore Data Center

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now run their cloud computing infrastructure in a data center in the Asia Pacific Region, as Amazon is now hosting services in a data center in Singapore.

Until now, the main AWS platform has only been available from data centers in the U.S. and Europe. Amazon has offered nodes for its CloudFront content delivery network in Hong Kong and Tokyo, but has not offered other popular AWS services like S3 and EC2 from those locations. Amazon did not disclose any details on the size or location of the facility in Singapore, including whether it had built its own facility or was leasing space from another provider. Equinix operates a major data center in Singapore where it hosts equipment for customers including Salesforce.com, and Savvis also has a Singapore facility.

What's clear is that Amazon customers have been clamoring for options in region. "One of the most frequent and resounding requests over the last year has been for AWS to launch an Asia Pacific presence," said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services. "We've heard it from Asia Pacific companies already using AWS in our US data centers; we've heard it from our U.S. and European customers wanting to better serve Asia Pacific end-users; and we've heard it loud and clear from Asia Pacific businesses who preferred to wait to leverage the AWS infrastructure platform until we had a data center presence in Asia."

Among those APAC customers is Kim Eng Securities, a leading securities brokers that is using AWS to host its trading application for the iPhone, which will be launching soon.

"By leveraging AWS' physical infrastructure in Asia, we are able to minimize latency for our KE Trade iPhone mobile trading app and the speed of our app will not be compromised if there are any sudden spikes in end user traffic," said Ong Seng Gee, Executive Director, Kim Eng Securities. "Going forward, Kim Eng intends to use AWS cloud computing infrastructure to help enhance our development capability and product innovation, to reinforce our position as a leading stockbroker in Asia."

Indiagames said it will use the new Singapore AWS presence to launch a Facebook game based on the Indian Premier League (IPL), an extremely popular cricket league in India and around the world.

"We weighed our options and the decision to use AWS was clearly the best option for launching and running the IPL Indiagames T20Fever game on Facebook," said Vishal Gondal, CEO of Indiagames. "We have demanding infrastructure requirements and AWS allows us to focus on our business while reducing operational overhead. By leveraging Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon CloudFront, we've been able to handle thousands of gamers concurrently without having to spend a rupee on physical infrastructure."

The expansion is also being welcomed by Amazon's partner community. "Our clients now have four regions to choose from, which allows them to deploy applications closer to user populations and ultimately provide an enhanced user experience," said Simon Plant, Product Lead of Cloud Computing, Capgemini. "This is yet another uplift in the capability of AWS and provides our global client base with more choice and flexibility."