In March of last year, Jeff Barr announced the plan for an AWS Region in Malaysia. Today, I’m pleased to share the general availability of the AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region with three Availability Zones and 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 and the Mainland China Beijing and Ningxia Regions.

The Petronas Twin Towers in the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s central business district.

The new AWS Region in Malaysia will play a pivotal role in supporting the Malaysian government’s strategic Madani Economy Framework. This initiative aims to improve the living standards of all Malaysians by 2030 while supporting innovation in Malaysia and across ASEAN. The construction and operation of the new AWS Region is estimated to add approximately $12.1 billion (MYR 57.3 billion) to Malaysia’s gross domestic product (GDP) and will support an average of more than 3,500 full-time equivalent jobs at external businesses annually through 2038.

The AWS Region in Malaysia will help to 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) established a presence with its first AWS office in Malaysia. Since then, AWS has provided continuous investments in infrastructure and technology to help drive digital transformations in Malaysia in support of hundreds of thousands of active customers each month.

Amazon CloudFront – In 2017, AWS announced the launch of the first edge location in Malaysia, which helps improve performance and availability for end users. Today, there are four Amazon CloudFront locations in Malaysia.

AWS Direct Connect – To continue helping our customers in Malaysia improve application performance, secure data, and reduce networking costs, in 2017, AWS announced the opening of additional Direct Connect locations in Malaysia. Today, there are two AWS Direct Connect locations in Malaysia.

AWS Outposts – As a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and AWS services, AWS Outposts is ideal for applications that need to run on-premises to meet low latency requirements. Since 2020, customers in Malaysia have been able to order AWS Outposts to be installed at their datacenters and on-premises locations.

AWS customers in Malaysia
Cloud adoption in Malaysia has been steadily gaining momentum in recent years. Here are some examples of AWS customers in Malaysia and how they are using AWS for various workloads:

PayNet – PayNet is Malaysia’s national payments network and shared central infrastructure for the financial market in Malaysia. PayNet uses AWS to run critical national payment workloads, including the MyDebit online cashless payments system and e-payment reporting.

Pos Malaysia Berhad (Pos Malaysia) – Pos Malaysia is the national post and parcel service provider, holding the sole mandate to deliver services under the universal postal service obligation for Malaysia. They migrated critical applications to AWS, which increased their business agility and ability to deliver enhanced customer experiences. Also, they scaled their 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), ensuring disruption-free services.

Deriv – Deriv, one of the world’s largest online brokers, is using Amazon Q Business to increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation in its operations across customer support, marketing, and recruiting departments. With Amazon Q Business, Deriv has been able to boost productivity and reduce onboarding time by 45 percent.

Asia Pacific University – As one of the leading tech universities in Malaysia, Asia Pacific University (APU) uses AWS serverless technology such as Lambda to reduce operational costs. The automated scalability of AWS services has led to high availability and faster deployment that ensure APU’s applications and services are accessible to the students and staff at all times, enhancing the overall user experience. 

Aerodyne – Aerodyne Group is a DT3 (Drone Tech, Data Tech, and Digital Transformation) solutions provider of drone-based enterprise solutions. They’re running their DRONOS software as a service (SaaS) platform on AWS to help drone operators worldwide grow their businesses.

Building cloud skills together
AWS and various organizations in Malaysia have been working closely to build necessary cloud skills for builders in Malaysia. Here are some of the initiatives:

Program AKAR powered by AWS re/Start – Program AKAR is the first financial services-aligned cloud skills program initiated by AWS and PayNet. This new program aims to bridge the growing skills gap in Malaysia’s digital economy by equipping university students with transferrable skills for careers in the sector. As part of this initial collaboration, PayNet, AWS re/Start, and WEPS have committed to starting the program with 100 students in 2024, with the first 50 from Asia Pacific University serving 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 ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum. AWS Academy currently runs courses in 48 Malaysian universities, covering various domains. Since 2018, 23,000 students have been trained through 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 is also collaborating with PETRONAS to train their employees using the AWS Skills Guild program.

AWS’s contribution to sustainability in Malaysia
With The Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040 and is on a path to powering 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 after, 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.

In July 2024, AWS and Zero Waste Management collaborated on the first-ever AWS InCommunities Malaysia initiative, 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 its businesses to help create a more sustainable future.

Things to know
AWS Community in Malaysia – Malaysia is also home to one AWS Hero, nine AWS Community Builders and about 9,000 community members of three AWS User Groups in various cities in Malaysia. If you’re interested in joining AWS User Groups Malaysia, visit their Meetup and Facebook pages.

AWS Global footprint – With this launch, AWS now spans 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic Regions around the world. We have also announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

Available now – The new Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region is ready to support your business, and you can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Services by Region page.

To learn more, please visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page, and start building on ap-southeast-5!

Happy building!
— Donnie