Here’s why Amazon’s new Availability Zone is great for Australian AWS customers

Put your hands up if you’ve noticed the third availability zone (ap-southeast-2c) appear the IAM console over the last few weeks?

Here at GorillaStack we doff our hats to the more eagle-eyed folks among us here in Australia. If that’s you then email us and we’ll send you some free GorillaStack laptop stickers for your efforts.

So what are the implications for the new zone and why has AWS released it now?

A third availability zone enables AWS to launch new services previously unavailable for Australian customers – Aurora, Lambda, Elastic File System and Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL server.

We are finally a proper region. No longer will you have to look to Tokyo to host your Lambda functions. In fact you can access AWS Lambda from Sydney today! Read more about it on Amazon’s website.

A third availability zone should also improve performance, especially for high latency applications and businesses – games is one, which is timely given the recent Lumberjack and GameLift announcement. Capacity is another – as cloud adoption increases at an exponential rate, AWS needs to plan ahead in terms of scalability to meet the demand as Australian businesses continue their migration to the cloud.