Amazon cloud to cover Asia

Amazon.com is extending the global footprint of its cloud-computing business. The company said it will launch web services in the Asia-Pacific region, starting with Singapore in the first half of 2010 and expanding to other "availability zones" in the region in the second half of the year. Amazon didn't specify the other countries, or the pricing of web services in Asia, yet. The company recently slashed prices for its core Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service in the U.S. and Europe.

Amazon will launch in Asia with EC2 and its Simple Storage Service (S3), along with Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront. Amazon hasn't revealed much about the size of its cloud-computing business, though Asia would certainly be a growth opportunity.

Amazon reportedly has internet data centers in Hong Kong and Tokyo, so presumably it has a technology backbone to support web services in parts of Asia (the company has Chinese and Japanese ecommerce websites). Amazon also software development centers in Bangalore and Chennai, India.

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About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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