1st Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific Region Finally Opens

We got the news last November of Amazon setting up “Availability Zones” in Singapore for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now, it’s finally reality. Developers and businesses can access AWS services from the new “Singapore” Availability Zones beginning today, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS). More details on each of these services and specific pricing for each is available here.

Many businesses and developers in Singapore are already using AWS. These include one of Asia’s leading securities brokers Kim Eng, iTwin – creator of the iTwin consumer device which provides plug and play remote file access [we interviewed the founders Lux and Kal last Sep and DS3 – provider web security solutions for enterprises and financial institutions in Asia Pacific [DS3 recently raised Series A funding from JAFCO Asia and Infocomm Investments)

For those who are unfamiliar with AWS, here’s the problem it solves in Amazon’s words:

Before AWS launched in 2006, businesses would take on the massive capital investment of building their own infrastructure or contract with a vendor for a fixed amount of datacenter capacity that they might or might not use. This choice meant either paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that the amount of capacity they forecasted was insufficient to keep pace with their growth. Businesses spent time and money managing their own datacenter or a co-location facility, which meant time not spent on growing their actual business or differentiating their offering for customers. When it launched in 2006, AWS offered a completely new way to run virtually any business that used technology—incur no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, turn capital expense into variable operating expense, pay only for what you use, add or shed resources as quickly as you wish, free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running your own infrastructure—all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security.

Sign up for AWS here.