Amazon to Launch Cloud Data Center in Korea

Amazon’s cloud services unit is preparing to launch a cloud region in South Korea early next year, which will be its fifth region in Asia Pacific.

An Amazon Web Services region usually consists of multiple data centers linked by a wide area network. The company did not specify how many cloud data centers it was planning to bring online in Korea.

Providing public Infrastructure-as-a-Service has become a race among giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google to enhance functionality, reduce price, and expand scale. These companies are spending billions of dollars every quarter on data center infrastructure as they compete for cloud market share.

Amazon’s announcement, which the company’s chief cloud evangelist Jeff Barr made in a blog post Wednesday, is yet another example of US-based cloud giants going aggressively after Asia’s rapidly growing cloud services market.

Other recent examples are IBM’s deal with Chinese data center provider 21Vianet to provide its Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service to customers in China and the launch of IBM’s first SoftLayer data center in India. Microsoft launched three cloud data centers in India earlier this year.

Asian cloud service providers are expanding data center capacity in the region too. Chinese e-commerce and cloud giant Alibaba recently brought online a new data center in the Zhejiang Province.

Barr listed existing Korean customers that will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s new cloud data center capacity when it comes online. They include startups, gaming companies, and enterprises, the latter category including the electronics giant Samsung.

“These customers (and many others) have asked us for a local region,” Barr wrote. “We are looking forward to making it available to them and to many other enterprises, startups, partners, government agencies, and educators in Korea.”