AWS Melbourne now officially open

Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of its Melbourne region

This will feature three Availability Zones, and is the second AWS region in Australia.

The region was first mooted in December 2020, and said to open in the second half of 2022.

The new region is estimated to provide an average of more than 2,500 full time jobs annually through a planned investment of approxiamately $6.8 billion in Australia by 2037.

The construction and operation of the Melbourne region is also estimated to add approximately  A$15.9 billion to Australia’s GDP by 2037.

Steve Day, the chief technology officer at the National Australia Bank, said the financial institution has been exploring the potential use case for the Melbourne region since its 2020 announcement.

NAB is consideriing locating key banking applications and critical workloads near its workforce, to enjoy the benefits of lower latency or delay, and to simplify disaster recovery planning.

AWS also said Melbourne fintech Littlepay will seek to take advantage of the lower latency with compute resources closer to the company, as well as advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and Australian Statistics Bureau are also looking at scaling their computing solutions with the new Victorian AWS egion.

RMIT said the low latency and high throughput at the new AWS region in Melbourne, along with its 400 gigabit per second private fibre-optic network will drive new ways of innovation and collaboration that are yet to be discovered.

The university recently launched RACE, or the RMIT University's AWS Cloud Supercomputing for its researchers working with large data sets.

As part of the announcement, AWS also said it has invested in two renewable energy projects in Australia.

The two facilities, the Amazon Solar Farm in Gunnedah and Suntop, will aim to generate 392,00 mega Watt hours of renewable energy every year.

Combined with further project in the works, the Amazon Wind Farm Australia in Hawkesdale, the combined output of the facilities will be rated at 717,000 MWh annually, AWS said.

AWS launched a Local Zone in Perth with limited instance types in January, with a further location in Brisbane being planned.