A few months back I spoke to Amazon Web Services’ Chief Information Security Officer Stephen Schmidt about how his company was expanding in Australia and East Asia.
One of the questions I asked was about the Australian footprint where all of AWS’s services are based in Sydney. Many of the company’s customers have questioned the suitability of that setup.
Schmidt was dismissive of the need for data centres outside of Sydney to serve the Australian market saying, “the Australian footprint is largely based on what the customers tell us. Right now they are happy with the way things work in Sydney, we have POP locations in other areas for edge access.”
“What we hear from customers is the network connectivity between Melbourne and Sydney is very good,” he added, “it’s really irrelevant whether you’re based in either city.”
During the storms that hit Sydney last week those words came back to haunt AWS as their data centers were knocked out of action.
Not a good look and now one suspects a Melbourne based data center, or at least some redundancy down under, is now higher on AWS’s to-do list.