Australian Amazon datacentre? Or just a CDN node?

To a certain degree, the speculation is so then-grounded. The company has launched an Australian office with local staff, last week it held a moderately sized series of roadshows in Sydney and Melbourne to talk to local clients, and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has even been out pressing the flesh with startups and students.

Now, each of these regional datacentres is believed to be quite large. An article published by very useful site Data Center Knowledge just last week tells us just how large they are — $88 million per month for 8MW worth of electricity? 46,000 servers? That’s a lot of power and floor space. And Amazon is adding to that space continually … every day the company adds the same amount of new capacity that it used to support all of its global infrastructure throughout its first five years — when it had $2.7 billion in annual revenue.

The big kahunas of the Amazon world

So these are the big kahunas of the Amazon world. Nevertheless the company as well has a second set of smaller infrastructure assets — consisting of its edge network.

On the image above, you can see that clustered around the main Amazon ‘regions’ are smaller sites located in other countries — France, the Netherlands, Hong Kong in short on, as then as many states in the US. These sites are likely much smaller than Amazon’s main datacentres, and they appear to act mainly as the company’s content distribution network — efficiently funnelling content out from Amazon’s core to other regions. Amazon has commercialised this model in accordance with its ‘Cloudfront’ banner.

New Australian ‘region’

For Amazon to invest in a new Australian ‘region’, when there are no regional facilities in countries like India, with its massive population of 1.1 billion and a burgeoning IT industry, just sounds ludicrous. Sure, Australia punches above its weight when it comes to consuming cloud computing resources — nevertheless does it punch bigger than India? Not actually.

It would make sense for Amazon to establish a CDN node in Australia to serve these media players, whose businesses are more about distributing traffic. Amazon does have clients in Australia with actual high-end processing requirements, to put it more exactly than traffic distribution needs, however I’m betting companies like Kaggle and Cyclopic Energy don’t in fact care whether their processing is done — they just want it done as cheaply as possible.

There is the opportunity that Amazon will create in Australia what I would term a ‘hybrid’ model of datacentre. It might combine its basic content distribution network model with a small amount of extra processing and storage space, so that it can gain a toehold in the local market and start discussing options with the local chief information officers that Vogels was so keen to discuss last week.