[kylemuir]

I imagine Microsoft announcing a data centre here played a significant role - AWS wouldn't want to be the cloud service with _less_ regions than Microsoft.

There are significant AWS customers in New Zealand (Xero jumps to mind) that I imagine Microsoft would love to target with that differentiator of a local data centre.

[sofixa]

But AWS have less regions than Azure:

25+8 under construction for AWS[0]

65(some under construction) for Azure[1]

However Azure regions are a single DC, while an AWS region is 3 Availability Zones ( each being at least a single DC), which is much much better for redundancy. Remember that time the whole of Azure's portal and O365 were inaccessible (nobody could log in) because some equipment failed in a single DC in Texas? Design for failure

0 - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ 1 - https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/microsoft-azure-announces-...