Amazon Web Services Adds Asia Pacific/Tokyo Region

Is Amazon Web Services turning Japanese? TalkinCloud thinks so, as the infrastructure-as-a-service giant launches the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, bringing lower latency cloud services to businesses across Japan even as they reduce their on-premises IT costs. Amazon’s bragging that it provides single-digit latency times to Japanese end-users from the new Tokyo Region.

Currently, the new region supports the whole range of Amazon Web Services offerings, including the Amazon EC2 compute cloud, the Amazon S3 storage cloud, and the just-launched AWS CloudFormation infrastructure template service, according to the press release. Moreover, the Amazon Web Services support plans are available in Japanese for the first time. And billing in Japanese yen is coming shortly.

On a related note, RightScale, which prides itself on vendor-agnostic cloud management, took the occasion to drop TalkinCloud a line to remind us that they’ve been experiencing huge cloud momentum in Asian markets for a while now.

Furthermore, RightScale CTO Thorsten von Eicken wrote a blog with many interesting factoids on getting their platform to work with the new AWS region – including the tidbit that, internally, every Amazon region is designed differently, with account credentials the only things shared. It’s well worth a read for an inside look at what makes both RightScale and Amazon Web Services tick.

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