Last week, AWS announced the launch of their Sydney region, the second in APAC and their 9th globally. For Cloud Advantage, this is very much a dream come true. Often we’re talking to organisations who want to move to cloud but come up against the common issue of high latency to the Singapore or US regions and also the problem of data sovereignty. Now in Australia we mostly solve both those problems. The region was officially launched at the AWS Customer Appreciation Day at the Sydney Westin last week on 13th November by Andy Jassy. What I found most compelling about his talk was the insight into how AWS was born, from someone who was actually there at inception. I’d heard versions of the story before yet Andy’s account was very much the most entertaining and candid.
At Cloud Advantage, we believe cloud computing fundamentally changes the way organisations employ computing and we seek to be at the bleeding edge of what can be done, always looking for radical improvements for all our clients. Ultimately our goal is to see tangible results for customers in the form of cost savings and vastly improved solutions.
I believe the Sydney region launch marks the beginning of the journey for many Australian organisations into the cloud. After the day I was so tired of hearing the word cloud. Like any term which can mean many different things, I begin to cringe when it is used in the wrong context, and it also eventually loses it’s meaning. The true story here is that cloud represents an evolution in the way people use computers: whether it be small companies creating a vastly superior email solution than inhouse exchange by using Google Apps, or a large bank circumventing the burden of provisioning anything with owned infrastructure by running a new project in AWS, or Dropbox all of a sudden providing a more user friendly and technically superior solution to old file servers in house, or Heroku providing developers with a PaaS that makes them more efficient and that they love using. Cloud infrastructure and services are changing the economics of computing in organisations, reducing the huge overheads of the past, obsoleting the large enterprise installation teams previously required to roll out changes that are now often just a click of a button. This means a huge productivity increase for our workforce, and a far lower cost of ownership for all organisations.
Technically, the Australian region means lower latencies for web applications serving content out of EC2 instances or S3, as well as the ability to ingest large amounts of data much faster through internet connections or AWS Direct Connect, and will make users more likely to attach their existing networks via AWS VPC. Having used EC2 and S3 locally already, I’m seeing a far more snappy interaction. Logged into the instance is more like having the machine on premises and S3 is able to deliver and receive data far quicker. Several partners I’ve spoken to are excited about serving content locally simply because it means google will acknowledge faster page load times and thus improve their respective search relevance scores.
Pricing in the Sydney region is exactly that of Singapore which more than anything is a relief for most prospective customers. Their fears of a higher price point due to Australia’s climbing electricity and labour cost structures are relieved.
One of the services notably absent from our Sydney region is AWS Glacier. I’m sure they’re working on it, however, AWS will never tell when or if the service will be released. One of our clients recently moved around 300TB of data into Glacier in the Northern California region and say regularly the service must have been built just for them. This makes me happy! However, Amazon have a tendency to build services that solve common problems at their core thus enabling vendors to build on top of that to provide enhanced services, and in this case, rest assured many vendors are scrambling engineering resources to enable their products for Glacier. I remember reading a blog post on backblaze building their own “storage pod” in order to produce cheaper storage than relying on something like S3. I feel their unique advantage has been severely threatened by Glacier, though their value is still firm as a leading consumer backup solution.
Regardless of this missing service, I personally love the AWS Sydney region. For Cloud Advantage, it injects new excitement and life into our business and means we’ll be able to deliver radically improved solutions to organisations around Australia.
Cheers
James
realcloud 