AWS is excited to announce its upcoming limited preview of its China (Beijing) Region. In the limited preview, which will be deployed in early 2014, a select group of China-based and multinational companies with customers in China will be invited to begin using the new Beijing Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Businesses or software developers can apply for access to the limited preview of AWS services in the AWS China Region today at http://www.amazonaws.cn.

Customers who wish to use the new Beijing Region are required to sign up for a separate set of account credentials unique to the China (Beijing) Region. Customers with existing AWS credentials will not be able to access resources in the new Region, and vice versa.

Under the Limited Preview phase, access to the new Region will be by invitation only. AWS will periodically review applicants for the limited preview and invite more and more customers to experience our services in China. The China (Beijing) Region aims to help customers reduce latency to end-users based in China while avoiding the up-front expenses, long-term commitments, and scaling challenges associated with maintaining and operating their own infrastructure. Beijing joins Sydney, Singapore and Tokyo as the fourth Region in Asia Pacific and as the tenth Region worldwide. We will gradually open up the Region for a wider range of customers over time.

AWS’s new Beijing Region will support Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Management Console, and AWS Premium Support.

Please visit the new China website for more information at www.amazonaws.cn.