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In March last year, Jeff Barr announced the plan for an AWS Region in Malaysia. Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of the AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region with three availability zones and the API name ap-southeast-5.
The AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region is the first infrastructure region in Malaysia and the thirteenth region in Asia Pacific, joining the 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 in the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s central business district.
The new AWS Malaysia Region will play a central role in supporting the Malaysian government’s strategic Madani Economy Framework, an initiative that aims to improve the standard of living of all Malaysians by 2030 while supporting innovation in Malaysia and across the ASEAN region. The construction and operation of the new AWS Region is estimated to increase Malaysia’s gross domestic product (GDP) by approximately US$12.1 billion (MYR57.3 billion) and support an average of more than 3,500 full-time jobs in external companies annually by 2038.
The AWS Malaysia Region will help meet the high demand for cloud services while supporting innovation in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia.
AWS in Malaysia
In 2016, Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened its first AWS office in Malaysia. Since then, AWS has continuously invested in infrastructure and technology to drive digital transformation in Malaysia and support hundreds of thousands of active customers every month.
Amazon CloudFront – In 2017, AWS announced the launch of the first edge location in Malaysia to improve performance and availability for end users. Today, there are four Amazon CloudFront locations in Malaysia.
AWS Direct Connection – To continue to help our customers in Malaysia improve application performance, secure data, and reduce network costs, AWS announced the opening of additional Direct Connect locations in Malaysia in 2017. Today, there are two AWS Direct Connect locations in Malaysia.
AWS Outpost – As a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and services, AWS Outposts is ideal for applications that must run on-premises to meet low-latency requirements. Since 2020, customers in Malaysia have been able to order AWS Outposts for installation in their data centers and locations.
AWS customers in Malaysia
Cloud usage in Malaysia has been steadily gaining momentum over the past few years. Here are some examples of AWS customers in Malaysia and how they use AWS for different workloads:
PayNet – PayNet is Malaysia’s national payments network and a common central infrastructure for the financial market in Malaysia. PayNet uses AWS to run key national payment loads, including the MyDebit online cashless payment system and e-payment reporting.
Pos Malaysia Berhad (Pos Malaysia) – Pos Malaysia is the national postal and parcel service provider and sole service provider under the Universal Service Obligation for Malaysia. The company migrated critical applications to AWS, increasing its business agility and enabling it to deliver an enhanced customer experience. The company also scaled its compute capacity to handle deliveries to more than 11 million addresses and a network of more than 3,500 retail touchpoints using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to ensure uninterrupted services.
Derivative – Deriv, one of the world’s largest online brokers, uses Amazon Q Business to increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation in its customer support, marketing, and recruiting operations. With Amazon Q Business, Deriv was able to increase productivity and reduce onboarding time by 45 percent.
Asia Pacific University – As one of the leading technical universities in Malaysia, Asia Pacific University (APU) leverages AWS serverless technology such as Lambda to reduce operational costs. The automated scalability of AWS services has resulted in high availability and faster deployment, ensuring that APU’s applications and services are accessible to students and staff at all times, improving the overall user experience.
Aerodyne – Aerodyne Group is a DT3 (Drone Tech, Data Tech and Digital Transformation) solution provider for drone-based enterprise solutions. They run their DRONOS software as a service (SaaS) platform on AWS to help drone operators worldwide grow their business.
Building cloud competencies together
AWS and various organizations in Malaysia have worked closely together to build the necessary cloud skills for builders in Malaysia. Here are some of the initiatives:
AKAR program powered by AWS re/Start – The AKAR program is the first financial services-focused cloud skills program initiated by AWS and PayNet. This new program aims to address 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 first collaboration, PayNet, AWS re/Start and WEPS have committed to launch the program in 2024 with 100 students, with the first 50 from Asia Pacific University to serve as a pilot.
AWS Academy – AWS Academy aims to bridge the gap between industry and academia by preparing students for industry-recognized certifications and careers in the cloud with a free and classroom-ready cloud computing curriculum. AWS Academy currently offers courses in various fields at 48 Malaysian universities. Since 2018, 23,000 students have been trained under this program.
AWS Skills Guild at PETRONAS – PETRONAS, a global energy and solutions provider with a presence in over 50 countries, has been an AWS customer since 2014. AWS also partners with PETRONAS to train its employees through the AWS Skills Guild program.
AWS’s contribution to sustainability in Malaysia
With the Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to achieving carbon neutrality across its entire business by 2040 and is on track to power its operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.
In September 2023, AWS announced its collaboration with Petronas and Gentari, a global clean energy company, to accelerate sustainability and decarbonization efforts in the global energy transition. Shortly thereafter, in December 2023, AWS customer PKT Logistics Group became the first Malaysian company to join over 300 global companies in The Climate Pledge to accelerate the world’s path to net-zero carbon emissions.
In July 2024, AWS and Zero Waste Management collaborated on the first-ever AWS InCommunities Malaysia initiative, the Green Wira Programme, to train educators to build sustainability initiatives in schools to advance Malaysia’s sustainable future.
Amazon is committed to investing and innovating across all its businesses to help create a more sustainable future.
What you should know
AWS Community in Malaysia – Malaysia is also home to one AWS Hero, nine AWS Community Builders, and about 9,000 community members from three AWS User Groups in different cities in Malaysia. If you are interested in joining AWS User Groups Malaysia, visit their Meetup and Facebook pages.
AWS global presence – With this launch, AWS now includes 108 Availability Zones in 34 geographic regions around the world. We also announced plans for 18 additional Availability Zones and six additional AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
Now available – The new Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region is ready to support your business. For a detailed list of services available in this region, see the AWS Services by Region page.
To learn more, please visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page and start building on ap-southeast-5!
Have fun building!
— Donnie
