AWS has recently announced the general availability of their newest region in Melbourne Australia (ap-southeast-4), adding to their portfolio of AWS regions and local zones within the Asia-Pacific areas. This announcement has been long awaited by the Australian community and is a huge step forward in the adoption of cloud computing within Australia allowing for further scalability and flexibility for both businesses and developers.
With the introduction of this new region, it opens up a huge range of possibilities for businesses and online workloads. Here are some of the use cases that will benefit from the newly available region.
Melbourne Local Businesses
Businesses local to Melbourne can now host their applications and data closer to their customers, improving responsiveness to their applications by taking advantage of the lower latencies afforded by the ap-southeast-4 region. With the widespread adoption of mobile devices, this becomes especially important as any differences between loading speeds on various websites will be amplified.
Search engines also take into account the location of a user when determining the relevancy of a website. By hosting your website closer to your target market, you can improve your search engine rankings, increasing your visibility to potential customers.
Melbourne Local Governments
The Victorian government has recently signed an agreement with AWS allowing all Victorian government departments to purchase its cloud services via a standard agreement. Previously having to rely on the Sydney AWS region, Victorian government departments can now host their data and applications within the Victorian borders, helping comply with local compliance and data sovereignty regulations
Latency Sensitive Services
Real-time services such as online voice and video services, multiplayer gaming and live streaming are all use cases where having servers close to the end-user can greatly impact user experience. Due to the nature of these services, any delay or variations in connectivity can be very obvious and negatively affect the perceived availability or stability of the service itself. Hybrid workloads can also be sensitive to latency as they often require a high degree of connectivity between the on-premises data centre and AWS.
One challenge faced by organisations that are migrating to the cloud is the performance of the network between their on-premises data centre and AWS. As workloads are being migrated to the cloud the entire workload is generally moved across in one go to reduce the impact on the business. This was done so that the workload components such as the web service and database can remain as close as possible to each other. The new ap-southeast-4 region allows for a more flexible approach where components of the workload can be migrated to the cloud in a staggered manner. Workloads can be spread across the Melbourne on-premises data centre and AWS, taking advantage of the lower latencies and scalability of AWS.
Multi-Region and Disaster Recovery Environments Within Australia
Ensuring your applications and services' resilience is a key part of any business continuity plan. As a result of ap-southeast-4's availability within the AWS ecosystem, it is now possible to design a completely cloud-native disaster recovery or multi-region environment contained entirely within Australia. Running your applications in multiple regions allows you to take advantage of the scalability and elasticity benefits of the cloud and also provides a fallback in the event of a disaster.
This benefit is even more apparent for businesses that have data sovereignty requirements. By utilising the ap-southeast-4 region, you can reduce the complexity of having to manage and maintain a backup data centre and the associated costs associated with it. The same tools and technologies that you use to manage your production workload can easily be tweaked to deploy a secondary environment and allow for a seamless experience for both your operation teams and developers. This is greatly enhanced when using infrastructure as code tooling such as CDK, Cloudformation or Terraform.
Summary
The addition of the ap-southeast-4 region is a huge step forward for the adoption of cloud computing within Australia, allowing Melbourne businesses and governments to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of the cloud. Historically, workloads being deployed to AWS have had little choice but to run in the Sydney region. This increases the friction for businesses and developers to adopt the cloud, as they generally prefer to run their applications and data as close to their business or customers as possible.