Amazon Web Services establishes Malaysia office

While the average chap usually associates Amazon as the world’s largest purveyor of goods online from books to bakers’ goods and everything in between, they actually do more, far more than that. If you’re savvy on the dark of how the Internet works, you’ll be aware that Amazon’s spin-off subsidiary, Amazon Web Services is one of the world’s largest cloud computing providers on the planet, offering scalable cloud computing services to all manner of customers that include high profile local outfits like local banking giant Maybank, Fraser & Neave (yes – the chaps that make those awesome neon orange fizzy drinks), Grab, movie streaming provider start-up iFlix, KFit, TrendMicro and more.

At the recent Malaysia leg of their global series of AWS Summits held in Kuala Lumpur that was held on 26 April, they showcased a host of both local and international outfits that took advantage of the scalability and performance that AWS’s cloud computing platform is able to offer to a crowd of invitees, delegates and partners as well as sharing insights on their latest developments, product offerings and how AWS can help businesses grow.

“We’ve been in business now more than ten years and we are enjoying 70% year on year growth since our inception a decade ago and we have over 1,000,000 active customers per month. To date, we have ten times the compute capacity compared to the combined resources of the other 14 cloud providers combined,” said Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com when he took the stage to a packed conference hall at the One World hotel in Kuala Lumpur to provide the keynote that kicked off the summit.

Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com delivery the AWS Summit Keynote

During the course of the event, AWS shared how their services were able to improve and expand the businesses of their customers. Supercell, the developers behind hit mobile thumb twiddler Clash of Clans (yes, that Clash of Clans), demonstrated how the vast capacity behind AWS was able to help them host thousands of concurrent players for their games. Other success stories were showcased as well with medical conglomerate Bristol-Meyers Squibb as an example showing how they relied on the vast computing power behind AWS to get a 98% reduction time in conducting clinical trials by crunching theoretical scenarios and data in record time. During the summit, AWS announced the upcoming launch of additional AWS data centers to supplement the existing data centers across the globe in Montreal, Ohio, Ningxia and India.

Local start-ups like iFlix showcased how they were able to take advantage of AWS’ services to deliver and streamline their business at the recent AWS Summit

AWS also announced a host of enhanced services across the board for customers including an interesting device that looks like a nuclear football for moving large amounts of data between clients and AWS’s data centers dubbed an AWS Import/Export Snowball. Each Snowball is a ruggedised, secured suitcase mounting a massive hard disk that can survive a six-foot drop and still shrug it off. while allowing you to securely encrypt and transfer massive amounts of data in 50TB chunks.

An AWS Snowball Image Credit:AWS

Their most momentous announcement was that AWS has set up an office in Kuala Lumpur to service the growing customer base in the country. While the nearest data center for AWS is located in Singapore, their establishment of an office in Malaysia includes not only includes the usual customer support but also training and technical services as well to offer more timely onsite support to customers in the region. For more details swing by www.aws.amazon.com