Amazon Web Services to be Available in Hong Kong Next Year

World's leading cloud platform Amazon.com, Inc.'s AMZN Amazon Web Services (AWS) is gradually expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

The online retail giant announced the launch of a new datacenter region in Hong Kong, the company's eighth in the Asia Pacific. It is expected to be operational in 2018.

The recent launch is in response to increasing customer demand for AWS presence in the Hong Kong region. Organizations here have been increasingly moving their mission-critical applications to AWS. Amazon believes the new investment will help to better serve the growing base of enterprise, public sector, and startup customers in Hong Kong.

Asia-Pacific Expansion Continues

The company forayed into this region in 2010 with the opening of its first AWS Region in Singapore. Since then AWS has expanded its bases in Japan, Australia, China, Korea, and India.

Following the launch of AWS APAC (Hong Kong) Region, there will be 19 Availability Zones in Asia Pacific for customers.

On a worldwide basis, AWS is accessible across 43 Availability Zones (AZs) through 16 technology infrastructure regions worldwide. These AZs enable businesses to save costs, accelerate innovation, expedite the time to market as well as expand their geographic presence within minutes.

The company also has 21 AWS Edge Network Locations in Asia Pacific. This enables customers to serve content to their end users with low latency, giving them the best application experience.

The new investment in the region will not only perk up the service for existing customers but also attract new businesses to the cloud. This has led Amazon to believe that Asia Pacific will be one of AWS's main regions in the long run.

Benefits of Using the AWS

The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region will comprise three AZs. These AZs are actually datacenters located at distinct places within a single region but equipped to operate independently of other AZs. Though these remain interconnected over a low-latency network, their power sources, cooling and physical security are totally independent of one another. These factors contribute to lower down time and therefore increase efficiency for companies using cloud resources.

Additionally, its reliability and scalability are a big advantage for many startups who want to cut costs related to in-house installations.

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Our Take

AWS is in the business of providing computing infrastructure like a utility, so companies are not needed to maintain their own IT infrastructure. It facilitates the movement, which we have come to know as cloud computing.

AWS' sales touched $3.6 billion in the first quarter of 2017, reflecting an increase of 3.5% sequentially and a massive 42.7% year over year. AWS is also the biggest public cloud infrastructure provider in the market, ahead of Google GOOGL, Microsoft MSFT, IBM Corp. IBM, VMware and many others.

However, the speed at which businesses are moving to the cloud and increasing innovation in the space has intensified competition. This also puts pressure on Amazon's resources. Despite the increasing competition, we remain positive about AWS' growth prospects. Amazon's continuous efforts to launch new features, open more datacenters globally and constantly lower prices will give it a competitive advantage.

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