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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added an Australian edge location, as foreshadowed^* by The Register last week.

In an email to customers sent at 6:27PM Wednesday, Sydney time, the company said:

We are excited to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Sydney, Australia to serve end users of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. This is our first edge location in Australia and with this location Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 now have a total of 33 edge locations worldwide.

The email adds that “An edge location in Australia has been frequently requested by our customers so we are excited to add this location to our global network. If you’re already using Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53, you don't need to do anything to your applications as requests are automatically routed to this location when appropriate.” The Sydney location offers identical functions to other CloudFront edge locations.

In a blog post, the company says it opened the Sydney node because:

Based on customer requests, internal logging, and the response to our recent survey, we believe that this location will prove to be of great benefit to our customers, providing them with increased performance and reduced latency. We believe that CloudFront's pay-as-you-go pricing model will provide Australian companies and global companies with a very cost-effective alternative to traditional content delivery solutions.

This new location will speed up the delivery of static, streaming and dynamic content to end users in Australia, and will also accelerate the resolution of DNS queries that originate from within the area.

At its recent summit, AWS announced Vodafone and News Ltd are among its local clientele. Both seem ideal users for the low-latency content delivery offered by the combination of the CloudFront caching service and DNS-speeder Route 53.

Paul Montgomery, Founder and Editor of fantasy sports site FanFooty, which serves 3.5 million weekly page views from AWS' S3 cloud storage service during the football season, welcomed AWS' local arrival.

"In my experience, there is no comparison with Australian cloud services on price to Amazon," he said. "The only issue up to now had been location, if you're hung up about those few extra milliseconds in latency. Local cloud providers must be quaking in their boots like Fairfax executives."

UPDATE: 9:45 PM WEDNESDAY AWS' Singapore-based PR folks have got in touch and, in response to our query about whether these new services mean the company now has an Australian data centre said only that "we do not disclose this information." We also asked if the company plans to offer other services from a Sydney location, and were again diverted with a reply to the effect that "Our Australia-based customers are successfully using all our services in our current AWS Infrastructure Regions." ®

^*Click on the foreshadowed link and you'll see we suggested AWS would operate a compute-only cloud in Australia. We weren't right with that prediction, but at least did get right the fact that it wouldn't be a full local launch.

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