In November 2012 Australia got its first on-shore AWS region in Sydney. On January 23rd this year, AWS launched a second region here in Melbourne Australia, its 31st region globally.
At the time of writing the Melbourne region has 49 services live, compared to the 196 services available today in Sydney. So what is available now? Can you move your workloads to Melbourne today? Read on to find out.
Security and Governance
With many businesses adopting a multi-account structure for more secure isolation of their workloads, several use AWS ControlTower for management of their AWS landing zone. ControlTower is not yet active in the Melbourne region, meaning you can not set this as your organisation’s primary ‘home’ region. It is also not yet possible to extend governance of ControlTower to this region which is a path those running ControlTower in Sydney will likely want to take.
AWS Service Catalog is also missing, which explains the omission of ControlTower as it uses Service Catalog as one of its underlying dependencies.
Major security services such as GuardDuty, Inspector, Security Hub and Macie are all still yet to come online. With security being such a hot-topic in Australia of late, the omission of these services will likely be a non-starter for many organisations looking to extend workloads into this region.
Storage
One of the major use-cases for having another AWS Region on Australian soil is for backup and disaster recovery for the existing Sydney region. Australian businesses which were previously storing data outside of the Sydney region for regulatory and compliance reasons may now be able to bring their data back home with Melbourne now being a second on-shore option.
Amazon S3, one of the major foundational services which offers highly available and durable object storage, is live and ready to be used in Melbourne today. Considering S3 is such a core service, with many other AWS services dependent on it, it is not surprising it is one of the first services available in the region.
AWS Backup, a service used for centrally managing and automating backup tasks, is not yet available in Melbourne. AWS Snowball and Snowcone, services which provide physical hardware devices used by AWS customers for moving large-volume data to the cloud, are also missing.
DevOps Services
The DevOps services provided by AWS help automate the process of getting code into production quickly, securely and bug free, so that teams can focus on delivering high-quality software faster.
AWS CodeDeploy, a fully managed deployment service that automates the deployment of applications to instances, including Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and on-premises servers, is currently available.
Most of the AWS ‘Code’ services aren’t yet available, including CodePipeline, CodeBuild and CodeArtifact. Those provisioning infrastructure via Chef and/or Puppet may also need to temper expectations as AWS OpsWorks is also currently missing from the region.
Compute
On the compute front, it’s a strong start in Melbourne with EC2, a service for launching virtual servers in the cloud, and Lambda, a service for running serverless workloads, both being online and ready to be used today. Similarly, ECS and Fargate are also available for those running containerised workloads.
Missing is AWS Batch, which is used for running batch compute jobs, as well as the entire AWS Elemental suite, used for media workloads like video transcoding.
While EC2 is available today, not all instance types are. If you are planning on moving workloads from the Sydney region to Melbourne, you will likely want to assess this first.
Networking
The core AWS networking service, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), is available today in Melbourne. Missing however, is AWS Transit Gateway, which provides a highly scalable and secure solution for connecting VPCs, VPNs, and on-premises networks. A vital service for those organisations running hybrid, multi-account or multi-cloud networking configurations.
AWS Transfer Family, a service used for hosting FTP servers and securely transferring large amounts of data into and out of AWS, is not yet available. Additionally, businesses seeking protection against common web exploits, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, will find that AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is also missing from the new region.
While missing on launch day of the Melbourne region, AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), a service for securely sharing resources across AWS accounts, has already been enabled in the region. This is a positive sign that we can expect more services to come online over the coming weeks.
Data and IoT
If you’re looking to run relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, the good news is that you’ll have access to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). For those who prefer NoSQL databases, DynamoDB is also available.
If your business requires big data solutions, you will find that Athena and Glue are yet to come online. Additionally, those who are looking to leverage Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology will discover AWS IoT is not yet available.
Ready or not…
The region is very much in a foundational state today with core services, many of which other AWS services rely on, being live and ready to use. Bringing a new region online, spread across three availability zones for that matter, is no easy feat. Add to that the complexity of enabling the 200+ services AWS offers, it is no wonder these things take time.
As far as serverless workloads go, Melbourne is looking pretty good! Core services such as Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, S3, CloudFront, EventBridge, API Gateway and Route53 are all live today. Those running existing serverless workloads, or looking to try serverless for the first time, may find Melbourne a viable option today.
That said, the lack of governance and security services such as ControlTower, GuardDuty and SecurityHub may be a non-starter for those looking to deploy workloads in the region. Until these services come online, organisations will likely want to stick with the Sydney region, at least for the time being.
Overall, the launch of the new Melbourne region is a boon for the tech industry in Australia and it will be exciting to see how organisations take advantage of the lower latencies and faster response times offered by running workloads closer to their customers.
As an Advanced AWS consulting partner and official launch partner for the Melbourne region, Cevo is committed to helping AWS customers make informed decisions on how best to operate their businesses in the cloud. With the launch of a second AWS region in Australia we are excited to help share our expertise in how best to take advantage of the two regions both now, and as more services come online.
If you’d like a closer look at the full list of services available in Melbourne today, be sure to check out the AWS Regional Services page and stay tuned to this blog for updates as services come online in Melbourne over the coming months.
