Amazon Web Services Opens Hong Kong Data Center Region

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues its cloud push into China with a new data center region in Hong Kong that opened today. The AWS Asia-Pacific (Hong Kong) Region is the cloud giant’s eighth data center region in Asia-Pacific, and it joins Beijing, Mumbai, Ningxia, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.
The new region offers three availability zones. These are technology infrastructure in separate geographic locations with enough distance to reduce the risk of a single event hurting business continuity, but still near enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications. Each availability zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS says it has “thousands of customers” and partners in Hong Kong including Cathay Pacific, Fox Networks Group Asia-Pacific Limited, Gogo Tech, HSBC, Hong Kong Disneyland, KPMG China, Swire Coca-Cola, Television Broadcasts Limited, and Union Medical Healthcare. The new data center region allows them to run their applications locally, comply with local data residency requirements, and provide lower latency for end users in Hong Kong. It also puts AWS in a better position to compete against China’s top cloud provider, Alibaba.