Amazon has expanded the network of data centers underpinning its massively popular cloud services, moving into the Land Down Under.
This week, the company said it had opened a new "edge location" in Sydney, Australia, designed to speed the use of its S3 and CloudFront services inside the country. "Based on customer requests, internal logging, and the response to our recent survey, we believe that this location will prove to be of great benefit to our customers, providing them with increased performance and reduced latency," read a blog post from Amazon's Jeff Barr.
S3 is a way for businesses and developers to storage massive amounts of data online, while CloudFront is an Akamai-like "content delivery network," specifically designed to help web applications speed the delivery of oft-accessed content, including graphics and videos.
Amazon is best known as an online retailer, but in recent years, it has also built an enormous cloud operation -- known as Amazon Web Services -- that sells access to virtual servers, storage, and other computing resources that let businesses and developers build and operate online applications without installing their own hardware in their own data centers. S3 and CloudFront are just two of these services.
Last month, a handful of obscure internet records indicated that Amazon would be expanding into Sydney. But the company has not yet gone whole hog. An edge location is not a full-fledged Amazon data center capable of speeding access to the company's entire set of web services, including its primary Elastic Compute Cloud service, which provides instant access to virtual servers.
Currently, Amazon runs full data centers near Washington DC, San Francisco, Portland, São Paulo, Dublin, Singapore, and Tokyo. Presumably, for the edge location in Sydney, Amazon is leasing data center space from some other outfit.
