Amazon.com's remote computing arm has expanded into Japan after finding that developers in the tech-savvy Asian country want more local data storage and quicker data transfer times.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on its blog this week that it had opened a Tokyo Region, computing resources and Cloud services dedicated to Japan, with offerings such as Amazon EC2, a virtual computer rental, and AmazonS3, a Web storage service, among others. Services come with a Japanese-language website and developer forum.
"Developers in Japan have (said) that latency and in-country data storage are of great importance to them," Amazon Web Services said on the blog. "Long story short, we've just opened up an AWS Region in Japan, Tokyo to be precise.
"Put it all together and developers in Japan can now build applications that respond very quickly and that store data within the country," the blog post said.
The company used the term 'Region' in this case to mean the computing resources were dedicated solely to Japan, but did not specify where the resources were located. It has referred to other regions as datacenters. In this case, AWS was not specific and was not immediately available to clarify.
Amazon Web Services, started in 2006, is believed to have signed up 330,000 developers for cloud computing. Its other regions include Europe, Singapore and its home base the U.S.
Cloud computing refers to data storage, access and general computer use at locations unknown to end users. As it becomes more complex, service providers such as Amazon and Rackspace have added ways to give users more control or carry out more tasks in the cloud.
Amazon.com started out as an online retailer in 1995 and has quickly branched into other lines of business, such as self-publishing for authors and its Amazon Kindle e-reader.