Amazon will open a new region of AWS data centers in Korea in early 2016

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest public cloud currently available for hosting websites and applications, announced today that it will open a new region of data centers in Korea.

AWS already has several customers in Korea. “These customers (and many others) have asked us for a local region; we are looking forward to making it available to them and to many other enterprises, startups, partners, government agencies, and educators in Korea,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post on the news. The region will open in early 2016, he added.

This past June, Amazon said it would open a new region in India in 2016. And in late 2013, Amazon announced that it would open a region in China. A region in Germany popped up last year. Meanwhile, Amazon is also planning to open up a region in Ohio next year.

AWS has been expanded gradually ever since Amazon introduced it in 2006. But this year, the world finally saw just how large the AWS cloud was after Amazon began providing its specific financial figures in the company’s quarterly earnings statements. The business brought in $2.08 billion in revenue for the third quarter of this year, up 78 percent year over year.

The numbers help justify the continuing growth of the AWS fleet of data centers. This is just one way that Amazon is competing against the likes of Google, Microsoft, and IBM in the cloud business. (Features and price are also key factors.) Either way, it’s a competition that is not likely to let up anytime soon.