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Apart from providing first party service like Prime Video, and second party services like Netflix, Disney, etc... (and apart from data governance/sovereignty r

Apart from providing first party service like Prime Video, and second party services like Netflix, Disney, etc... (and apart from data governance/sovereignty reasons) might there be any specific industries that they targeting specific to NZ? Weta comes to mind, but I can only imagine they're a drop in the bucket.

aeyes 5y ago
Their Cloudfront CDN has been present in New Zealand since late last year. It's not just customers in NZ profiting from this, you will now have a disaster recovery region for Australia.
wseagar 5y ago
NZ resident here and in the tech scene. Here's some speculation: What I've heard is that the AUS data centres for Azure and AWS have been getting hammered and have been non stop adding servers/capacity. So from perspective it does make sense to move some of that load off to NZ. Microsoft announced their NZ data centre first, then because of data sovereignty issues you mentioned stands to gain all that business from govt and AWS is now trying to play catchup. Another big driver is banks, it is a data governance/sovereignty issue but its a little bit more nuanced than at first glance. In NZ almost all of our largest banks are Australian owned and are running multi-tenanted systems in AU data centres and are heavily invested in cloud. Our reserve bank has recently made this policy called BS11 requiring banks to bring all there IT systems onshore. https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bs11-impacts-and-its-it-implications https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bs11-impacts-and-its-it-implic... So I suspect both Microsoft and AWS have picked up huge contracts with banks which are subsidising these data centres to save the NZ banks from rewriting a ton of their systems not to use AWS/Azure.
- chrisjc 5y ago
  Perhaps I just don't understand the scale involved in banking, but I can't imagine that would be enough or even a substantial part of the driving force. I would think that a new region in AUS an or expansion of the current AUS one would have been a more prudent choice. Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic that NZ has 2/3 of the cloud providers setting up shop. NZ and NZ-ers often times punch way above their weight and I imagine this decision will only lower the barrier for many of those resourceful entrepreneurs. This combined with fiber rollout and starlink availability is really going to do wonders for NZ. Whatever the reason, it's exciting.

aeyes 5y ago

Their Cloudfront CDN has been present in New Zealand since late last year. It's not just customers in NZ profiting from this, you will now have a disaster recovery region for Australia.

wseagar 5y ago

NZ resident here and in the tech scene. Here's some speculation: What I've heard is that the AUS data centres for Azure and AWS have been getting hammered and have been non stop adding servers/capacity. So from perspective it does make sense to move some of that load off to NZ. Microsoft announced their NZ data centre first, then because of data sovereignty issues you mentioned stands to gain all that business from govt and AWS is now trying to play catchup. Another big driver is banks, it is a data governance/sovereignty issue but its a little bit more nuanced than at first glance. In NZ almost all of our largest banks are Australian owned and are running multi-tenanted systems in AU data centres and are heavily invested in cloud. Our reserve bank has recently made this policy called BS11 requiring banks to bring all there IT systems onshore. https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bs11-impacts-and-its-it-implications https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bs11-impacts-and-its-it-implic... So I suspect both Microsoft and AWS have picked up huge contracts with banks which are subsidising these data centres to save the NZ banks from rewriting a ton of their systems not to use AWS/Azure.

chrisjc 5y ago
Perhaps I just don't understand the scale involved in banking, but I can't imagine that would be enough or even a substantial part of the driving force. I would think that a new region in AUS an or expansion of the current AUS one would have been a more prudent choice. Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic that NZ has 2/3 of the cloud providers setting up shop. NZ and NZ-ers often times punch way above their weight and I imagine this decision will only lower the barrier for many of those resourceful entrepreneurs. This combined with fiber rollout and starlink availability is really going to do wonders for NZ. Whatever the reason, it's exciting.