AWS opens second cloud region in China
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to keep up its pace of global expansion and now plans to open its second cloud computing region in China in conjunction with Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology, a local technology provider.
Enterprise Cloud News (Banking Technology’s sister publication) reports that the AWS China (Ningxia) Region now joins the company’s other cloud region dubbed AWS China (Beijing) Region. Amazon now has 17 cloud zones scattered throughout the globe.
In other parts of the world, AWS owns and operates its own cloud infrastructures and the data centers that support them. However, China law dictates that foreign companies cannot own cloud computing infrastructures within the country. This is the reason that Amazon has turned to various partners to help its expansion.
While Ningxia Western will help operate the new cloud region, Beijing Sinnet Technology jointly runs the Beijing data centre.
Earlier this year, Amazon sold a portion of its China-based business to Sinnet for about $300 million, although the company said it was not pulling out of the country.
AWS has already signed up several prominent companies to use the new cloud region in China, including Samsung and Lenovo.
Right now, AWS is considered the largest provider of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in the world, dwarfing its two nearest competitors, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
In order to continue to grow, AWS is expanding into other regions, and China is considered a top prize for many of the various cloud providers.
At the same time, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing division of Alibaba Group, is also expanding in its home base of China, as well as other parts of Southeast Asia and India.
