Amazon Web Services to Expand Into Asia-Pacific

Amazon Web Services will expand its footprint to Asia-Pacific during the first half of 2010, the cloud-computing infrastructure vendor said Thursday.

Multiple new "availability zones" will be initially launched in Singapore during the first six months of next year, and in other Asian regions later in 2010, according to the company. The expansion will reduce latency issues for Asia-Pacific customers who may be using availability zones in the U.S. or Europe.

Initial services will include Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, Elastic MapReduce, CloudFront and the recently announced Amazon Relational Database.

Pricing information wasn't immediately available. Amazon Web Services recently cut costs for its EC2 service in other regions.

The announcement comes as interest in cloud computing is growing among Asia-Pacific developers, according to a report released in July by Evans Data Corp. More than 25 percent of developers in the region were either already using or planning to use cloud services within the following six months, according to the survey.

Meanwhile, this week Amazon Web Services also announced a software development kit for developers working with Microsoft's .NET technology.

The development kit includes APIs (application programming interfaces) "that hide much of the low-level plumbing associated with programming for the AWS cloud," according to an official blog post. Other features include code samples and templates for Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment).