Microsoft is to deploy an Azure cloud Edge region in Perth, Australia.

The company said this week that it will make a "significant extension of its global data center footprint to Western Australia (WA) to help meet the growing demand for cloud and AI services across the state and support economic growth."

Microsoft believes that “by bringing cloud services closer to users in WA," it can "reduce latency and improve service delivery for public and private sector customers."

The expansion will see Microsoft deploy an Azure Extended Zone to Perth by mid-2025.

“The addition of these new capabilities in Western Australia builds on Microsoft’s strong history of delivering state-of-the-art technologies to the public and private sectors,” said Steven Worrall, managing director at Microsoft Australia and New Zealand. “This cutting-edge infrastructure will play a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility, efficiency, and reliability of essential services for Western Australians. It will also empower businesses in WA to innovate and grow, driving significant transformation across industries.”

The company said the WA state government will be one of the first organizations to use the new infrastructure, with a focus on healthcare, education, and core government operations.

Roy Hill and Northern Star Resources, mining firms focused on iron and gold respectively, are also named as early customers.

Northern Star’s information technology manager, Stephen Johnston, said: “We are excited by the opportunities presented with Microsoft extending its Azure cloud capacity to Western Australia. This will enable us to host critical workloads providing high-performance, secure, scalable, and reliable services local to our head office in Perth and mine sites in Western Australia.”

Microsoft quietly launches Azure Extended Zones

Though they quietly hit preview in August, the Perth announcement is seemingly the first official piece of news from Microsoft mentioning Azure Extended Zones, a new Edge-cloud service akin to Amazon or OVH’s Local Zones.

In recently published documentation, Microsoft describes Azure Extended Zones as “small-footprint extensions of Azure placed in metros, industry centers, or a specific jurisdiction to serve low latency and data residency workloads.”

It offers a select number of services, including compute, storage, and networking, that are all currently in preview.

The company named low-latency or data residency as key use cases for using extended zones, in industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, government, gaming and media, retail, or oil and gas.

An Azure Extended Zone might be associated with a parent region in the same or a different country/region. Customer data will be stored and processed in the Extended Zone location, which may be outside of the associated geography and parent region.

Los Angeles is the only currently available Extended Zone. Customers have to request access from Microsoft.

The company hasn’t said which facilities the Azure infrastructure will sit in, but a post from a Microsoft engineer suggested Extended Zones consist of a “group of data centers within a single region,” offering a “higher level of resiliency than a single data center, but not as much as an availability zone.”