Conor McNamara (Managing Director of ASEAN, AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially launched its new Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region, with the cloud giant planning to invest an estimated US$5 billion (Rp71.7 trillion) in Indonesia over the next 15 years through the new infrastructure region.
"I’m delighted to share that the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region is now live," said AWS ASEAN managing director Conor McNamara in a social media post. "Not only are we bringing our services closer to our Indonesian customers, we’ll also be investing US$5 billion in Indonesia over the next 15 years.
"This is a part of our deep and long-term commitment in the country since setting up our local office in 2018, as we continue to support our rapidly growing customer base across Indonesia as well as help to accelerate the country’s digital economy.
"We will also continue working with the Indonesian government and other relevant agencies to invest in cloud skills enhancement initiatives, as we believe that a future-ready cloud skilled workforce can help boost the country’s economic growth," he added.
The anticipated investment includes capital expenditure on the construction of data centres, operational expenses related to ongoing utilities and facility costs and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses.
The investment is also estimated to sustain an average of 24,700 direct and indirect jobs annually during the 15-year time frame, according to a study undertaken by the cloud vendor.
Whether or not AWS’ anticipated jobs tally is on the money remains to be seen.
Regardless, if and when new jobs do emerge as a result of the cloud region, they are expected to reside largely in the AWS supply chain in Indonesia, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications and roles within the broader Indonesian economy.
The launch of the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region is right on schedule, with AWS flagging plans in 2019 to establish a region in Indonesia, at the time suggesting the new region would be open by early 2022.
From today, Indonesian developers, start-ups, entrepreneurs and enterprises, as well as government, education and nonprofit organisations can now run their applications and serve end users from AWS data centres located within Indonesia.
“The cloud provides organisations of all types and sizes—from businesses to educational institutions to government agencies—opportunities to transform their operations and reinvent experiences for their customers and end users,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, AWS vice president of infrastructure services.
“AWS is excited to announce our new Region in Asia Pacific and help Indonesian institutions, innovative start-ups, and world-leading companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country.
“Organisations across industries in Indonesia can now take advantage of the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region to lower costs, increase agility and drive innovation,” he added.
With the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region, AWS now claims 84 Availability Zones across 26 geographic regions globally, with previously announced plans to launch 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.
AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Availability Zones are typically located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity but close enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones, the company noted.
Each Availability Zone has its own independent power, cooling and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks.
It is claimed that the launch of an AWS Region in Indonesia provides local customers with lower latency across the country and supports disaster recovery applications for business continuity.
“Infrastructure from the world’s leading cloud provider plays a critical role in accelerating our digital economy,” said Perry Warjiyo, Governor of Bank Indonesia, the nation’s central bank, noting that it expects AWS’ cloud technology to help it achieve its vision and goals as outlined in the Indonesia Payment Systems 2045 blueprint.
This encompasses goals such as fully digitalising the nation’s payment systems and integrating a multitude of stakeholders and economic activities under the guiding principles of security and data protection.
Indonesia is becoming an emerging battleground for global cloud hyperscalers, with Microsoft earlier this year unveiling plans to launch its first data centre region in the country, going head-to-head with Google Cloud and AWS in a landmark move designed to deliver cloud services locally, aligned to in-country data security and privacy laws.
The public announcement saw Microsoft enter an increasingly competitive cloud race in Indonesia, following the launch of a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Jakarta in June 2020 and AWS' ambitions to establish its region by early 2022.
“We’re proud to support Indonesian businesses and governments in their move to the trusted cloud with Microsoft,” said Haris Izmee, Microsoft's president director of Indonesia, at the time. “This announcement validates our Berdayakan Ekonomi Digital Indonesia initiative, to empower every person and every organisation in Indonesia to achieve more.”
