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Amazon’s investment in Edge will bring some data hosted by the tech giant closer to Kiwi customers.
American shopping and tech giant Amazon has finally installed some physical infrastructure in New Zealand.
No, there is still no indication of a long-awaited move to invest in a local warehouse to distribute products to Kiwis, or that Amazon is following Microsoft by building a large cloud computing data center in the country.
But the subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it has invested in establishing an “Amazon edge location” in Auckland, making it one of 220 locations where customers can connect to its global network.
The facility can cache some types of data that are delivered to customers that they would otherwise have to obtain from elsewhere, such as their data centers in Australia, and perform other basic tasks without the data leaving New Zealand .
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That should mean that some types of services hosted with AWS, for example those that involve streaming video, run faster with up to 50% less lag.
Simon Elisha, a Sydney-based AWS technology executive, declined to disclose the size of the investment.
Rival Microsoft received approval from the Overseas Investment Office last month to purchase more than $ 100 million of land for an entire data center in Auckland that will support customers of its cloud computing platform. Azure.
Eliseo did not say if AWS planned to continue.
“We always get feedback from our customers on where they would like the next ‘AWS region,'” he said.
“We have a long list of countries and we evaluate it all the time,” he said.
But New Zealand customers said they wanted Edge’s capability and that was something they could now access “today,” he said.
