AWS Powers Up Korean Data Centres As Fifth Asia Pacific Region Goes Live

Amazon Web Services’ fifth Asia Pacific cloud computing region is now live, as the firm’s new South Korean data centres came online this week.

“Our Korean customers and partners have asked us to build AWS infrastructure in Korea so that they can run more of their workloads on AWS and approve new initiatives that could change their business and customer experience; we’re excited about delivering this to our customers today,” said AWS boss Andy Jassy.

AWS said that there had been thousands of customers in Korea using AWS Cloud from other AWS regions for years now. AWS first opened its Seoul offices in 2012, but with the launch of the Seoul Region, Korean-based developers and companies can take advantage of Amazon’s service closer to home with increased support and lower latency.

Two zones

The new Seoul region has two availability zones which raises Amazon’s global total to 32. The region now supports Amazon EC2 (T2, M4, C4, I2, D2, and R3instances are available) and related web services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing.

“I would argue that the cloud is the largest technology shift of our era,” said Jassy during a keynote at the region’s opening event in Korea. “AWS has the most mature, experienced platform.”

Customers and partners in Korea, including some giants in the popular South Korean gaming industry, include Nexon and Mirae Asset Global Investments Group.

Sang-Won Jung, VP of New Development at Nexon, said: “We are currently running our new mobile MMORPG game, HIT, 100 percent on AWS. This game set the record for achieving the number one sales ranking in the Korean mobile gaming industry in the shortest period of time.

With the new AWS region in Korea, we plan to use AWS not just for mobile games, but also for latency sensitive PC games as well.”

Customers like Nexon will benefit from lower latency, having had to previously connect to Amazon Web Services’ other Asia Pacific locations such as Singapore and Tokyo. The news comes as AWS announced its 51st cloud price cut to date. The cost of its EC2 service on some instances has been slashed by up to five percent.

“I am happy to be able to announce that we are making yet another EC2 price reduction!” said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr on the division’s blog.

“We are reducing the On-Demand and Reserved instance, and Dedicated host prices for C4 and M4 instances running Linux by 5 percent in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo),Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.”

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