Amazon Web Services To Launch New Zealand Cloud Region

The new AWS infrastructure region is slated to open in Auckland with three availability zones in 2024.

Amazon Web Services will open data centers for a new cloud region in New Zealand in 2024.

AWS will invest $5.3 billion in the new Asia-Pacific infrastructure region, which will launch in Auckland, in the north of New Zealand’s North Island, with three availability zones. It will be owned and operated by a local AWS entity in the country.

The new region will allow New Zealand customers with data residency preferences to run workloads and store data in the local cloud region and will provide lower latency across the country, according to AWS. Having three availability zones allows AWS to place infrastructure in separate geographic locations with sufficient distance to help support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications that use multiple zones, it said. Each zone has independent power, cooling and physical security, and is connected through redundant, high-bandwidth, ultra-low latency networks.

“AWS supports thousands of organizations across New Zealand in their drive to innovate, succeed and grow globally,” Prasad Kalyanaraman, AWS’ vice president of infrastructure services, said in a statement. “We are excited to build new world-class infrastructure locally, train New Zealanders with in-demand digital skills and continue to help local organizations deliver applications that accelerate digital transformation and fuel economic growth.”

AWS’ $7.5 billion investment in the Auckland cloud region will include capital expenditures on data center construction, operational expenses such as utilities and facility costs, and the purchases of goods and services from regional businesses, according to an AWS economic impact study. The cloud region will create an estimated 1,000 new jobs in New Zealand and have an estimated $7.7 billion economic impact on New Zealand’s gross domestic product in the next 15 years, according to the study.

AWS set up its first local New Zealand entity — AWS New Zealand — in Auckland in 2014 and this year expanded its presence with the opening of new offices there and in Wellington to support more than 100 employees, according to the company. AWS also has two Amazon CloudFront edge locations and offers AWS Outposts in Auckland. Amazon CloudFront is its programmable content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds, while AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure and operating models to nearly any data center, co-location space on on-premises environment.

New Zealand-based partners in the AWS Partner Network include Consegna, Datacom, Deloitte and Spark, AWS independent software vendors in New Zealand include Ambit, Aportio, Inteso, Orion Health, Raygun, Soul Machines, UneeQ and Xero.

Consegna, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, has worked with the cloud provider since the Auckland-based company’s launch in 2016.

“Consegna recently migrated 500 virtual servers across 14 lines of business within nine weeks for Quotable Value, saving 50 percent on their current infrastructure costs,” CEO John Taylor said in a provided statement. “Leveraging the AWS global infrastructure has enabled us to assist customers in Australia and New Zealand, and it’s helped us drive mass migrations as far afield as California in the U.S. by replicating our delivery methodologies and frameworks across availability zones and AWS regions that are consistently global.”

AWS currently has a total of 25 cloud regions with 81 availability zones and has announced plans for seven other regions with 21 availability zones in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.