This morning a Slack notification popped up on my desktop – intriguing to say the least. An AWS secret seems to be doing the rounds, an announcement that has the Jeff Barr blog chequered flag in its sights (the AWS News Blog). Fifteen minutes later it was official – Amazon Web Services announced that it will be opening a region down-down under – the new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) region.
The region is scheduled to open in 2024 – boasting the all-important three Availability Zone datacentre architecture, part of a NZ$7.5 billion investment strategy in the country over the next 15 years, set to generate 1,000 jobs. Like other region launches, it is expected that AWS will offer its core functionality services to start with and built on it over time. We can only hope or urge the AWS product teams that the launch is coupled with AWS Control Tower as a minimum.
The announcement comes as welcoming news for organisations that run business critical systems with low latency demands or regulated workloads with data sovereignty requirements. In recent years these two requirements repeatedly came up in customer workshops and occasionally resulted in no-go decisions, so the announcement further demonstrates the commitment from AWS on its Customer Obsession leadership principles.
AWS first opened its office in New Zealand back in 2013 and now employs over 100 solution architects, account managers, sales representatives, professional services consultants, and cloud subject matter experts.
Organisations with an objective to operate in the upcoming Auckland region, however, cannot delay until 2024 due to operational demands – a well-defined multi-account strategy and an infrastructure-as-code game plan will position Asia Pacific (Sydney) as a provisional landing zone. A good game plan will offer easy expansion or migration into AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) when the API-doors open in 2024.
AWS infrastructure already available in New Zealand includes a pair of Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Auckland along with access to the AWS global backbone through multiple, redundant submarine cables. Considering a move to the cloud and based in New Zealand, be sure to look at the current connectivity options, detailed the New Zealand Internet Connectivity to AWS blog.
In recent months, AWS has announced plans for 21 more availability zones and seven more AWS regions in Australia (Melbourne), India (Hyderabad), Indonesia (Jakarta), Israel (Tel Aviv), Spain, Switzerland (Zurich), and the United Arab Emirates.
The most interesting thought – what will be the API-region naming for the New Zealand region – ap-southeast-5 perhaps? Following announcements of Jakarta (perhaps on ap-southeast-3) and Melbourne (betting on ap-southeast-4)