By Henry Wagner, Chief Marketing Officer

From Local Zones and new Regions to Partner Programs – we jump right into some of the latest product and feature announcements from AWS re:Invent.

If there’s anything 2020 has taught us, it’s that it’s important to adapt to change. With remote working and changes to travel, as well as our interactions with each other at major events now virtual, AWS held nothing back by developing a multi-week jam-packed re:Invent 2020 conference held entirely online.

With AWS re:Invent just completing its three-week run, it’s a great time to recap how eventful the conference was, and what it means to us, our customers, and our partners as we close out 2020.

AWS did a fantastic job of delivering virtual keynotes in a seamless way–similar to their approach to on-site live conferences. This was the first year they added a Machine Learning keynote to the lineup which showcased AWS’s forward-thinking technologies. Another interesting portion of the conference was the focus on leadership sessions by practice. From Analytics, Networking and Content Delivery, Public Sector to Containers, there were plenty of amazing breakouts to educate organisations. They also wrapped up late-night recap sessions that included AWS CEO Andy Jassy along with live performances with acts such as multiple Grammy award-winner Brandi Carlile to capture the mood and atmosphere of the in-person conferences of years past.

With so many impressive sessions and announcements, let’s dive right into a few key areas that resonated with us, our customers, and partners.

Three More AWS Local Zones in 2020, and 12 More in 2021

AWS launched the first AWS Local Zone in Los Angeles last December, and added a second one (also in LAX) in August 2020. This solution specifically caters for US West Region customers looking to achieve very low latency performance for their applications. Organisations can leverage a wide range of EC2 instances and other compute to host local rendering, sports broadcasting, online gaming, financial transaction processing, machine learning inferencing, virtual reality, and augmented reality applications, among others.

Three more Local Zones were announced to add additional US Regions including Boston, Houston, and Miami, which are now available in preview. In 2021, AWS plans to open Local Zones in other key cities and metropolitan areas including New York City, Chicago, and Atlanta.

Customers who seek to enable Direct Connect to establish private connections between Local Zones and their existing on-premises or colocation IT infrastructure will be able to leverage Megaport for both AWS Hosted Connections and dedicated AWS Direct Connect.

New AWS ISV Partner Path Helps Expedite Your Engagement with AWS

AWS Partners who are currently registered as Technology Partners and have software solutions that run on or are integrated with AWS will be transitioned to the AWS ISV Partner Path starting in January. This gives ISVs immediate access to the most relevant AWS Partner Network (APN) programs and benefits, without having to meet the AWS Partner tier requirements.

Members of the ISV Partner Path will have enhanced access to funding benefits, such as an innovation sandbox for solution development, Market Development Funds (MDF) for joint go-to-market activities, and Partner Opportunity Acceleration (POA) to support customer proofs-of-concept.

While AWS ISV Partner Path doesn’t become generally available until January 2021, Megaport is aligned through our Premier Technology Partner status and our ISV relationship.

New AWS International Regions Helps Expand their Global Infrastructure Reach

AWS has a total of 24 Independent Cloud Regions each with multiple availability zones. New regions have been announced in the following locations: Cape Town, South Africa. Milan, Italy, Switzerland, Indonesia and Spain

Second regions have been announced for India, Japan and Australia thus allowing for even more diversity and increased availability of AWS infrastructure.

AWS has articulated its design mantra for defining Availability Zones and maintaining isolation of regions from each other to mitigate against multi-region disasters and provide higher SLA’s. These announcements allow a wider reach for customers wanting to leverage Megaport private connectivity for access to EC2 compute and S3 storage services.

Australia gains a second AWS Region in Melbourne

Another Asia-Pacific (Melbourne) region is in the works, and will open in the second half of 2022 with three Availability Zones. In addition to the Asia-Pacific (Sydney) Region, there are already seven Amazon CloudFront Edge locations in Australia, backed by a Regional Edge cache in Sydney.

This will be AWS’s second region in Australia, and their ninth in Asia-Pacific, joining the existing region in Australia along with those in China, India, Japan, Korea and Singapore.

A second region in Australia will give AWS customers the ability to build applications with greater fault tolerance, resiliency and even reduce latency for critical cloud workloads.

We look forward to supporting our customers and partners as they enable better ways to use AWS’s cloud services. Got any questions about AWS and Megaport? Feel free to tweet us and check out why Megaport is the easiest way to connect to AWS.