Last March, Jeff Barr announced plans for an AWS Region in Malaysia. Today, I am happy to announce the general availability of the AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region, with three Availability Zones and API name ap-southeast-5.
The AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region is the first infrastructure region in Malaysia and the 13th region in Asia Pacific, joining existing Asia Pacific regions in Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Melbourne, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, as well as the Beijing and Ningxia regions in mainland China.
The Petronas Twin Towers are located in the heart of Kuala Lumpur's Central Business District.
The new AWS Region in Malaysia will play a pivotal role in supporting the Malaysian Government's Strategic Madani Economy Framework, which aims to improve the standard of living for all Malaysians by 2030 and support innovation in Malaysia and across ASEAN. It is estimated that the construction and operation of the new AWS Region will increase Malaysia's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by approximately $12.1 billion (RM57.3 billion) and support an average of more than 3,500 full-time equivalent external jobs each year until 2038.
The AWS Region in Malaysia will help meet the high demand for cloud services while supporting innovation in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia.
AWS in Malaysia
Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened the first AWS office in Malaysia in 2016. Since then, AWS has continuously invested in infrastructure and technology to support hundreds of thousands of active customers each month and drive digital transformation in Malaysia.
Amazon CloudFront – In 2017, AWS announced the opening of its first edge location in Malaysia, improving performance and availability for end users. There are now four Amazon CloudFront locations in Malaysia:
AWS Direct Connect – To continue to help Malaysian customers improve application performance, secure their data, and reduce network costs, AWS announced that it will open additional Direct Connect locations in Malaysia in 2017. There are currently two AWS Direct Connect locations in Malaysia:
AWS Outposts – A fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and AWS services, AWS Outposts is ideal for applications that need to run on-premises to meet low latency requirements. Starting in 2020, customers in Malaysia can now order AWS Outposts to be installed in their data centers and on-premises locations.
AWS Customers in Malaysia
Cloud adoption in Malaysia has been steadily gaining momentum in recent years. Here we share some examples of AWS customers in Malaysia and how they are using AWS for various workloads.
PayNet – PayNet is Malaysia's national payments network and a shared central infrastructure for Malaysia's financial markets. PayNet uses AWS to run critical national payments workloads, including its MyDebit online cashless payment system and electronic payments reporting.
Pos Malaysia Berhad (Pos Malaysia) – Pos Malaysia is the state-owned postal and parcel service provider with the sole authority to provide services under Malaysia's postal service obligations. The company migrated critical applications to AWS to increase business agility and its ability to deliver a superior customer experience. The company also used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to scale computing capacity to handle deliveries to over 11 million addresses and a network of over 3,500 retail touchpoints to ensure uninterrupted service.
Deriv – Deriv, one of the world's largest online brokers, uses Amazon Q Business to make operations more productive, efficient, and innovative across their customer support, marketing, and recruiting departments. Amazon Q Business has enabled Deriv to increase productivity and reduce onboarding times by 45%.
Asia Pacific University – Asia Pacific University (APU), one of Malaysia's leading technical universities, is using AWS serverless technologies such as Lambda to reduce operational costs. The automated scalability of AWS services provides high availability and rapid deployment, improving the overall user experience by ensuring that students and staff can access APU's applications and services at any time.
Aerodyne – Aerodyne Group is a DT3 (Drone Technology, Data Technology, Digital Transformation) solutions provider offering drone-based enterprise solutions. The company runs its DRONOS Software as a Service (SaaS) platform on AWS to help drone operators around the world scale their businesses.
Build your cloud skills together
AWS and various organizations in Malaysia have been working closely together to develop the cloud skills needed for Malaysian builders.
Program AKAR by AWS re/Start – Program AKAR is the first cloud skills program for financial services launched by AWS and PayNet. The new program aims to bridge the growing skills gap in Malaysia's digital economy by equipping university students with transferable skills for careers in the sector. As part of this initial collaboration, PayNet, AWS re/Start, and WEPS have committed to launching the program with 100 students in 2024, with an initial pilot of 50 from Asia Pacific universities.
AWS Academy — AWS Academy aims to bridge the gap between industry and academia by providing a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum to prepare students for industry-recognized certifications and careers in the cloud. AWS Academy currently runs courses across a range of disciplines in 48 universities in Malaysia. Since 2018, 23,000 students have been trained through the program.
AWS Skills Guild for PETRONAS – PETRONAS, a global energy and solutions provider with a presence in over 50 countries, has been an AWS customer since 2014. AWS also works with PETRONAS to train their workforce using the AWS Skills Guild program.
AWS' contribution to sustainability in Malaysia
Under its Climate Pledge, Amazon has committed to achieving net zero carbon across its operations by 2040 and aims to power 100% renewable energy for its operations by 2025.
In September 2023, AWS announced a collaboration with Petronas and global clean energy company Gentari to accelerate sustainability and decarbonization efforts in the global energy transition. Shortly after, in December 2023, AWS customer PKT Logistics Group became the first Malaysian company to join the Climate Pledge, which joins more than 300 global companies to accelerate the world's path to net-zero carbon.
In July 2024, AWS and Zero Waste Management collaborated on the Green Wira program, a first-of-its-kind AWS InCommunities Malaysia initiative that trains educators to build sustainability initiatives in schools to drive a sustainable future for Malaysia.
Amazon is committed to investing and innovating across its business to help create a more sustainable future.
What you need to know
AWS Community in Malaysia – Malaysia has 1 AWS Hero, 9 AWS Community Builders, and approximately 9,000 community members across 3 AWS User Groups in different cities in Malaysia. If you are interested in joining the AWS User Group in Malaysia, check out our Meetup and Facebook page.
AWS Global Expansion – With this launch, AWS now spans 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic Regions around the world. AWS also announced plans to add 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
Available Now – The new Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region is ready to support your business, and a full list of services available in the region can be found on the AWS Services by Region page.
To learn more, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page, and start building with ap-southeast-5.
Happy building!
Donny
