The AWS announcement comes after the successful launch of AWS local zones in 16 US cities. AWS is now expanding the local zone concept to 30 more cities, two in our own backyard here in Australia. The deployment will occur over the next two years.

An AWS local zone is an infrastructure deployment placing AWS compute, storage, database, and other services at the edge of the cloud near large population, industry, and information technology centres. What this means in practice is AWS customers can deploy applications that require single-digit millisecond latency closer to end users or on-premises data centres.

The AWS local zone allows customers to use core AWS services locally while seamlessly connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS regions with the same elasticity, pay-as-you-go model, APIs and toolsets.

AWS regions have been hugely successful in providing low-latency applications for most situations, but more demanding applications requiring ultra-low latency can now benefit from AWS infrastructure physically closer to users or data centres. Such applications might be engineering simulations, media, entertainment, live video streaming, real-time gaming, augmented and virtual reality, or machine learning inference at the edge.

Thus, the new AWS local zones in Brisbane and Perth will provide Australian customers in those areas single-digit millisecond performance. The other local zones will be launched across 25 countries over the next two years.

“We know that delivering ultra-low latency applications for a seamless user experience matters for many businesses and industries, so we are excited to bring the edge of the cloud closer to more customers in Australia to help meet their requirements,” said Iain Rouse, director and county leader worldwide public sector, AWS Australia and New Zealand. “AWS Local Zones will empower more public and private organisations, innovative startups, and AWS Partners to deliver a new generation of leading edge, low-latency applications to end users, taking advantage of the cost savings, scalability, and high availability that AWS provides. The new AWS Local Zones are a continuation of our investment to support customers of all kinds and commitment to accelerate innovation by bringing cloud infrastructure to more locations in Australia.”

“Telstra is working with leading enterprise and government customers to drive transformation for the digital economy. We leverage our network infrastructure, and combine it with our edge, cloud, security, and Telstra Purple-delivered professional services, along with apps and devices to deliver digital innovation to customers in mining, agriculture, transportation, supply chain, retail and many other industries,” said Angela Logothetis, group owner for cloud, edge and industry networks, Telstra. “AWS is one of Telstra’s strategic partners and the expansion of AWS Local Zones in Perth and Brisbane will enable us to deliver the benefits of local public cloud services to more organisations in more industries - simplifying the experience and delivering greater agility to customers.”

“AWS Local Zones have the potential to deliver significant local capability for organisations in Brisbane, and enhance the speed at which we can deliver digital initiatives to benefit our citizens,” said Sandra Slater, CIO, Queensland department of transport and main roads (TMR). “Queensland TMR strategically collaborated with AWS to establish our mass migration approach to the cloud and help implement our digital business strategy to meet Queenslanders’ growing expectations for better user experiences. In working with AWS, we’ve already reduced operational expenses, unleashed data analytics capabilities, benefitted from rich security features, and enabled greater team collaboration and innovation. Access to low-latency infrastructure in Brisbane can help us to improve programs like the Cooperative and Automated Vehicle Initiative which leverages sensors, cameras, radar trackers, and other tools to help prepare for the arrival of new vehicle technologies with safety, mobility and environmental benefits on Queensland roads. These technologies generate huge amounts of data. Over 12 months, TMR’s pilot involving 350 cooperative vehicles generated about 10TB of data, with three million real-time messages processed on AWS.”

“Today’s announcement from AWS brings us even closer to our goal of delivering a digital platform set to transform experiences for our students and staff here in Western Australia,” said Jason Cowie, CIO, Curtin University. “AWS Local Zones will give us more access to compute, storage, and other services, without needing to forgo speed. Our project is unique in that we want to build a fully digital platform that shapes the next generation of experiences for our Curtin community. To build the future requires great talent and collaboration and we’ve chosen to do this with AWS and their partners because of their skills and capabilities. We welcome their continued investment in Western Australia and the flow on effect this will have for the local IT industry and the organisations that benefit from it.”

Over the next two years, new AWS local zones will launch in Amsterdam, Athens, Auckland, Bangkok, Bengaluru, Berlin, Bogotá, Brisbane, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Chennai, Copenhagen, Delhi, Hanoi, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kolkata, Lima, Lisbon, Manila, Munich, Nairobi, Oslo, Perth, Prague, Querétaro, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna, and Warsaw.

“The edge of the cloud is expanding and is now becoming available virtually everywhere,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of infrastructure services, AWS. “Thousands of AWS customers using U.S.-based AWS Local Zones are able to optimise low-latency applications designed specifically for their industries and the use cases of their customers. With the success of our first Local Zones in 16 U.S. cities, we are expanding to more locations for our customers around the world who have asked for these same capabilities to push the edge of cloud services to new places. AWS Local Zones will now be available in over 30 new locations globally, providing customers with a powerful new capability to leverage cloud services within a few milliseconds of hundreds of millions of end users around the world.”

“Netflix is poised to become one of the world’s most prolific producers of visual effects and original animated content. To meet that demand, we are hiring the best artistic talent from all over the world. These artists need specialised hardware and access to petabytes of images to create stunning visual effects and animations,” said Stephen Kowalski, director of digital production infrastructure engineering, Netflix. “Historically, artists had specialised machines built for them at their desks; now, we are working to move their workstations to AWS to take advantage of the cloud. In order to provide a good working experience for our artists, they need low latency access to their virtual workstations. AWS Local Zones brings cloud resources closer to our artists and have been a game changer for these applications. By taking advantage of AWS Local Zones, we have migrated a portion of our content creation process to AWS while ensuring an even better experience for artists. We are excited about the expansion of AWS Local Zones globally, which brings cloud resources closer to creators, allowing artists to get to work anywhere in the world and create without boundaries.”