Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Announcing the new AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region

Today, we’re pleased to announce that the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region is now generally available with three Availability Zones and API name ap-southeast-7.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region is the first infrastructure Region in Thailand and the fourteenth Region in Asia Pacific, joining existing Regions in Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Malaysia, Melbourne, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, as well as the Beijing and Ningxia China Regions.

Lumphini Park, one of the largest green spaces in central Bangkok spanning 142 acres.

The adoption of cloud computing has gained significant momentum in Thailand, driven by evolving business needs and government initiatives such as Thailand 4.0. These initiatives aim to transform Thailand into an innovation-driven economy by using emerging technologies to enhance productivity, competitiveness, and sustainable growth.

The new AWS Region will help startups, enterprises, government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations run their applications and serve end users while maintaining data residency in Thailand. This aligns with Thailand’s digital transformation goals and the growing demand for cloud services. Over the next 15 years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) planned investments in Thailand are estimated to contribute $10B to Thailand’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and support an estimated average of 11,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in local Thai businesses annually.

Growing presence of AWS in Thailand
Our journey in Thailand began in 2013 with the first AWS office in Bangkok. Since then, AWS has continuously expanded its infrastructure and services in the country:

Amazon CloudFront – Since 2020, AWS has established six Amazon CloudFront edge locations throughout Thailand. These edge locations are part of the highly secure and programmable AWS content delivery network (CDN), designed to accelerate the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds.

AWS Outposts – In the same year, 2020, AWS introduced AWS Outposts to the Thai market. As a fully managed solution, AWS Outposts brings AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location, enabling a truly consistent hybrid experience. This service is particularly valuable for workloads that require low latency, local data processing, or local data storage.

AWS Local Zones – In 2022, AWS strengthened its commitment to Thailand by launching AWS Local Zones in Bangkok. This infrastructure deployment places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers. As a result, customers can deliver applications requiring single-digit millisecond latency to end users.

AWS Direct Connect – AWS established a AWS Direct Connect location in Bangkok in 2023 to enhance connectivity options and added a new AWS Direct Connect location with the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region. Customers can use AWS Direct Connect to establish secure and dedicated network connections to their AWS resources, providing improved network performance and reduced bandwidth costs.

AWS customer success stories in Thailand
Organizations in Thailand are using our services to drive innovation and transformation. Here are a few examples:

2C2P
2C2P, a leading Thailand-based FinTech startup, chose AWS for its robust security capabilities. As an omnichannel payment service provider in Southeast Asia, the company processes millions of customer payments globally using AWS CloudHSM for cryptographic key management, AWS Shield for distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, and AWS Secrets Manager to safeguard sensitive credentials.

“Through AWS, we’ve unlocked the power to securely, dynamically, and compliantly scale to meet the surge in payment transaction volumes. AWS CloudHSM plays a pivotal role in fulfilling compliance requirements and propelling us toward accelerated business expansion,” says Myo Zaw, Chief Technology Officer at 2C2P.

aCommerce
aCommerce, the largest ecommerce enabler in Southeast Asia, has revolutionized market intelligence by launching AskIQ, a generative AI–powered feature on AWS. This software as a service (SaaS) platform provides the world’s leading brands with comprehensive competitor and category performance tracking capabilities across Southeast Asia’s largest ecommerce sites.

Leena Chanvirach, VP of Data Products at aCommerce Group, emphasizes the strategic value of their AWS collaboration: “Our collaboration with AWS allows clients to double down on their core competencies and business priorities. This best-of-both-worlds approach gives brands a competitive edge without the burden of building and maintaining sophisticated data infrastructure in-house.”

Ascend Money
Ascend Money, a leading Southeast Asian FinTech company, achieved a 70 percent reduction in compute costs while simultaneously improving application performance by up to 40 percent in certain workloads. Ascend Money implemented a sophisticated compute strategy using Amazon EC2 instances, resulting in significant operational improvements.

“AWS has significantly improved our performance, enabling us to deliver more innovative services to our customers,” says Peerawit Phuangkaeo, Head of Technical Operations at Ascend Money.

Building cloud skills together
AWS has built comprehensive programs for cloud education and skills development in Thailand, training more than 50,000 individuals in cloud skills since 2017. Here are some of the programs:

AWS Skill Builder
AWS Skill Builder is an online learning center where you can learn from AWS experts and build cloud skills online. AWS has made cloud education more accessible to Thai learners by offering more than 600 courses, with 106 courses specifically available in Thai language. The recent launch of the Amazon AI Ready initiative has further expanded the learning opportunities, particularly in the growing field of AI.

AWS Educate
Since its introduction in 2016, AWS Educate has played a transformative role in Thai education. The program has successfully integrated cloud computing into educational curricula across Thailand, providing students with direct access to AWS resources and hands-on experience. The impact has been substantial, with over 20,000 Thai students enrolled in the program. Beyond student education, AWS Educate has invested in training Thai educators, preparing them to deliver engaging and practical cloud computing courses that prepare students for the demands of the digital economy.

AWS Academy
AWS Academy has been instrumental in connecting academic learning with industry needs since its launch in Thailand in 2017. Through strategic partnerships with more than 30 leading universities and colleges across the country, AWS Academy has created a robust pipeline of cloud-skilled professionals. The program provides educational institutions with comprehensive cloud computing curricula that align with industry needs, making sure that students graduate with practical, job-ready skills.

Through these various initiatives and programs, AWS is not just providing educational resources, it’s building a foundation for Thailand’s digital future by helping equip the workforce with the necessary skills to use cloud technologies effectively.

Supporting sustainable innovation in Thailand
The AWS commitment to sustainability extends to supporting innovative companies in Thailand that are driving environmental initiatives.

BODA Technology & Consultancy
BODA, an AWS powered sustainability startup, uses AWS IoT Core to develop AI-powered solutions for energy efficiency optimization. The company has successfully improved operations in over 100,000 buildings and factories across Thailand, enabling these facilities to maximize efficiency while reducing costs and environmental impact.

GSPC Group
GSPC Group, a leading sustainable power company in Thailand, demonstrates how AWS supports the energy sector’s digital transformation. Following the merger between Global Power Synergy Public Company and Glow Energy, the group chose AWS Cloud for migrating its photovoltaic solar plant operations. Working with AWS and AWS Partner Dailitech, GSPC Group has achieved a 20–25 percent reduction in hardware, software, and licensing costs since moving to the cloud.

Things to know
AWS Community in Thailand — Thailand is home to two AWS Heroes, seven AWS Community Builders, and more than 17,000 members of the AWS User Group. If you’re interested in joining AWS User Group Thailand, visit their Facebook page.

AWS Global footprint — AWS now spans 111 Availability Zones within 35 geographic regions worldwide. We have announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Germany, Taiwan, Mexico, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and New Zealand. 

The new Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region is ready to support your business. To learn more, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page and start building on ap-southeast-7!

Happy building!
Donnie



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Monday, January 6, 2025

Happy New Year! AWS Weekly Roundup: 2025 Tech Predictions, Llama 3.3 70B, Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large, custom billing view, and more (January 6, 2025)

Happy New Year! We are witnessing technology augment human ingenuity in inspiring ways. In the coming years, using technology for positive impact will redefine the way we think about success. Amazon CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, offers five forward-looking tech predictions for 2025, and beyond:

  • The workforce of tomorrow is mission-driven
  • A new era of energy efficiency drives innovation
  • Technology tips the scales in the discovery of truth
  • Open data drives decentralized disaster preparedness
  • Intention-driven consumer technology takes hold

Download the Werner Vogels’ Tech Predictions for 2025 and Beyond ebook, or read Werner’s All Things Distributed blog to learn more about how these technological trends are shaping our world and paving the way for a more innovative, efficient, and purposeful future.

AWS re:Invent 2025 videos and re:Caps
If you’re looking to catch up on re:Invent announcements or delve deeper into the latest AWS innovations, you have several options available:

Launches from the last few weeks
Since our last week in review on December 16, 2024, I’d like to highlight some launches from year end, as well as from last week:

Availability of Llama 3.3 70B in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and in Amazon Bedrock – Meta’s Llama 3.3 70B represents a significant advancement in model efficiency and performance optimization. Llama 3.3 70B is a text-only instruction-tuned model that provides enhanced performance relative to Llama 3.1 70B and Llama 3.2 90B, when used for text-only applications. You can now use the model in both Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, as well as Amazon Bedrock.

Availability of Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large in Amazon Bedrock – Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large by Stability AI is the most powerful model in the Stable Diffusion family at 8.1 billion parameters trained on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod. You can now use Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large in Amazon Bedrock to generate high-quality images from text descriptions.

New Amazon Kinesis source connector for Apache Flink – The Apache Flink community has released version 5.0.0 of AWS services connectors, an AWS open source contribution. This release introduces the Kinesis Streams Source, a new connector for reading data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, replacing the previous Kinesis Consumer.

Support of AWS Global Accelerator in Amazon WorkSpaces PersonalAmazon WorkSpaces Personal now integrates with AWS Global Accelerator (AGA) to enhance WorkSpaces connection performance by optimizing streaming traffic through the AWS Global Network and edge locations. This feature particularly benefits customers whose end users connect to WorkSpaces across long distances. You can enable the AGA feature at either the WorkSpaces directory level or for individual WorkSpaces running Amazon DCV protocol.

New resource insights in AWS Resource Explorer – With the enhanced Resource Explorer experience, relevant data and insights from multiple AWS services is centralized for supported resource types. You can use the new features to take actions on resources directly from the Resource Explorer console, such as manage tags, add resources to applications, and get additional information about a resource with Amazon Q.

General availability of custom billing view in AWS Billing and Cost Management – Custom billing view allows you to provide application and business unit owners access to relevant cost management data across multiple AWS accounts using a single view in AWS Cost Explorer without granting access to the AWS management account. You can create filtered views of cost management data based on cost allocation tags or specific AWS accounts.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS at CES 2025 (January 7-10) – AWS will be representing some of the latest cloud services and solutions that are purpose built for the automotive, mobility, transportation, and manufacturing industries. Join us to learn about the latest cloud capabilities across generative AI, software define vehicles, product engineering, sustainability, new digital customer experiences, connected mobility, autonomous driving, and so much more, in Amazon Experience Area.

AWS at NRF 2025 (January 12-14) – Join AWS at the retail’s big show to see generative AI and cutting-edge technologies in action. Listen to innovative big ideas sessions, curated TechTalks, and experience the latest in retail trends, and technologies, and more.

Amazon QuickSight Learning Series – Kick off your 2025 by supercharging your data skills. Join the online Learning Series in January to learn about the cutting-edge features of Amazon QuickSight unveiled at re:Invent 2024.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

Prasad

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!



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