Amazon opens two availability zones in Korea
Thu 7 Jan 2016
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch of two new availability zones in Seoul, answering Korean customers’ demand for data sovereignty options.
The new availability zones mark Amazon’s move into its twelfth geographical region and will support Amazon EC2 (T2, M4, C4, I2, D2, and R3 instances are available). AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr released in a statement yesterday that other related services, such as Amazon Elastic Book Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing would also be listed.
The service has been made available from today, and developers are able to access the zones via aws.amazon.com. While Amazon has not yet released detailed information about the individual zones, it is expected that each area consists of one or more data centres, able to deliver services, at less than 10 milliseconds, across Korea.
The new option will also provide Amazon a way into the public sector market in Korea. In September last year, the first ever cloud computing law, The Act on the Development of Cloud Computing and Protection of Users, was passed in Korea. The legislation encourages public bodies to actively look for cloud strategies – AWS and its ability to meet data sovereignty requirements is now a clear choice.
According to Amazon, the availability of two zones will guarantee fault tolerance and failover. It has also promised highly-scalable solutions in order to meet changing demand.
“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,” commented AWS senior VP Andy Jassy.
Amazon claims that thousands of Korean customers have been using AWS Cloud from other AWS regions for years, now the company has merely to migrate these existing customers to the Seoul zones.
