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Amazon Web Services has announced it has established its first AWS CloudFront content delivery network edge locations in Auckland.
AWS said New Zealand was now connected to the AWS global infrastructure network of more than 220 points of presence in 87 cities across 44 countries.
"The launch of our first AWS edge location in New Zealand demonstrates AWS’s commitment to helping local customers innovate and build, increase productivity, expand into new markets, and enhance the nation's digital infrastructure," said Nick Walton, managing director for AWS’s commercial sector in New Zealand.
The new edge locations provide secure, reliable connectivity to the rest of the AWS global network and support for AWS edge services including AWS Global Accelerator.
They are priced within CloudFront’s Australia geographic region, will provide end users with as much as a 50 per cent reduction in latency measures, Amazon said.
“New AWS edge location will help to reduce latency in serving real-time digital content to our customers, such as video, music, web-native shows and notifications, which is particularly good news for New Zealand companies that are scaling their use of AWS to deliver online broadcast services,” said Walton.
"Using the Amazon CloudFront CDN can be considered best practice for securing access to content and protecting sensitive customer data.
"By using AGA, WAF and AWS Shield in parallel, customers can set protocols, encryption, and protect against common web threats to ensure compliance to regulatory standards without sacrificing performance."
In May, Microsoft announced it was establishing a full datacentre region in New Zealand, building two datacentres in Auckland, probably with Infratil-owned Canberra Data Centres.
CloudFront delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds within a developer-friendly environment.
It competes with the likes of Akamai, which was recently called in to help combat distributed denial of service attacks against the NZ Stock Exchange.
AWS Global Accelerator (AGA) is a service that improves the availability and performance of end user’s traffic by using AWS’s global network infrastructure.
When the internet is congested, AGA’s automatic routing optimizations help keep packet loss, jitter, and latency consistently low.
CloudFront also works with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code closer to customers’ users and to customise the user experience.
