Extra tags: Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is happening unabated, and it is only accelerating by the day. This rapid digitalisation is birthing new customer demands, including low latency, which is simply the time it takes for data to pass from one point on a network to another. Low latency is, in turn, necessary to improve app performance, reduce lag, process data faster and drive productivity upwards.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recognises this increasing demand for low latency, especially in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, and it will address this demand by launching AWS Local Zones—10 of them in 6 APJ countries. Phil Davis, Regional Managing Director for Commercial in APJ at AWS, describes a Local Zone as “a type of infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database and other services closer to customers.” This then enables these same customers to “build and deploy applications that require single-digit millisecond latency closer to end-users or on-premises data centres.”
In total, AWS plans to roll out 32 AWS Local Zones in 20 countries worldwide. In the APJ region, in particular, these Local Zones will be launched in these cities:
-
Brisbane and Perth in Australia.
-
Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata in India.
-
Auckland in New Zealand.
-
Manila, in the Philippines.
-
Bangkok in Thailand.
-
Hanoi in Vietnam.
Once completed, these Local Zones will pave the way for three main benefits:
-
Ultra-low latency. With very low latency, end-users can get better access to innovative apps that require single-digit millisecond latency.
-
Consistent AWS experience. End-users can utilise familiar AWS infrastructure, services and APIs wherever and whenever without performance and speed being compromised.
-
Flexibility and scalability. End-users, particularly organisations, can leverage cloud services better with high availability, on-demand scaling and pay-as-you-go pricing.
The AWS Local Zones rest firmly at the centre of the AWS cloud continuum, in between the broader AWS Regions and the more specific collection that includes AWS IoT Greengrass and FreeRTOS, AWS Snowball, AWS Snowcone and AWS Snowmobile.
The Local Zones’ use cases, therefore, lie somewhere in between as well—meaning, they are meant for users in either specific or multiple locations (distributed edge) using highly demanding apps that require single-digit millisecond latencies. Use cases confined to specific locations include content creation, Augment Reality and Virtual Reality and enterprise migration. On the other hand, use cases for the distributed edge include real-time multiplayer gaming, virtual workstations (for remote work) and live streaming.
The launch of AWS Local Zones coincides with two critical developments. The first is the expected expansion of the cloud, whose current market value of USD $130 billion is forecast to grow to USD $282 billion due to complex cloud deployments fast becoming the norm. The second is the rise of the edge, which is an essential component of distributed computing models where infrastructure and applications are deployed outside a centralised data centre and closer to where data is generated and consumed.
Critically, many businesses are planning to deploy latency-sensitive applications on the edge, like data management (planned by 38% of organisations surveyed by AWS), data analytics (35%), enterprise applications such as CRM (34%) Artificial Intelligence and Machine-Learning (28%) and collaborative apps (2%). This further underpins the pressing need to bring cloud infrastructure and services closer to the edge and the wisdom of rolling out AWS Local Zones.
“In 2022, cloud deployment model choices are driven by both workload requirements and business opportunities, and will accelerate enterprise migration to multiple cloud environments that support [the] ubiquitous deployment of digital services,” said Chris Morris, Vice President, IDC Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) at Cloud Services and Technology Group. “Cloud services delivered from locations close to the user will provide the capabilities necessary to provide the ROI that makes these services successful.”
Perhaps just as important is that with these Local Zones, organisations will no longer have to pony up exorbitant upfront costs in infrastructure investment in case they want to bring the cloud’s many benefits closer to end-users. This means they can offer the sought-after capabilities outlined previously and have the kind of agility, scalability and flexibility required in this fast-paced, rapidly changing and digitally transforming world.
