Introducing DigitalOcean’s state-of-the-art data center in Sydney, Australia

As part of DigitalOcean’s mission to simplify cloud computing, we want to make it easier for you to deliver fast, reliable, and superior experiences to your customers. To further that mission, today we are excited to announce the availability of our state of the art data center in Sydney, Australia, SYD1. You can now deploy Droplets, spin up DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters, provision a managed database, or utilize any other DigitalOcean product from SYD1. This is DigitalOcean’s first data center in the southern hemisphere, and expands our global footprint to fifteen data centers across nine regions.

The cloud computing market in Australia is growing rapidly and SYD1 makes it easier for startups, SMBs, and developers in and around Australia and New Zealand to get the best performance from DigitalOcean. Our Sydney data center also makes it easier for businesses to provide superior experiences to their end customers in this region: Performance tests have shown an average of 6x reduction in round trip time latency for customers using the Sydney data center services from major cities in Australia, when compared to using DigitalOcean’s Singapore data center.

A globally connected, modern data center

In addition to being DigitalOcean’s first data center in the region, SYD1 has several unique qualities that will enable best-in-class performance:

1. Excellent network connectivity: The Sydney data center is connected to DigitalOcean’s private internet edge and backbone network. This reduces DigitalOcean’s dependency on the public internet and provides you with direct access to Asia, North America and Europe via direct, diverse connections to California and Singapore. Since the requests travel mostly on our network, users of SYD1 will experience exceptional performance while mitigating the effects of jitter, latency and packet loss which are usually associated with sending your data over the public internet.

2. High network throughput/capacity: In addition to connecting SYD1 to our backbone network, we have significantly increased its capacity. SYD1 provides 400 Gbps of connectivity to the internet backbone network and is connected to California and Singapore via lowest latency links that are available today. Apart from global connectivity, we also focused heavily on SYD1’s domestic connectivity. SYD1 provides a 400 Gbps of domestic connectivity to key local transit providers such as Telstra and Vocus, and another 400 Gbps of connectivity to domestic internet peering exchanges such as EdgeIX. Think of these investments around network capacity as pipes - we have not only used shortest routes to connect pipes but also significantly increased the diameter of pipes, resulting in vastly improved performance.

3. Peering with hyperscalers: Startups and SMBs commonly use a multi cloud strategy to increase redundancy, and decrease vendor lock in. DigitalOcean customers are no different and often use hyperscalers as part of their multi cloud strategy. SYD1 provides seamless peering with hyperscalers which makes it easier to adopt a multi-cloud strategy for your business.

4. Quick Failovers: In the event of a network glitch, the SYD1 infrastructure ensures that failovers happen quickly - often in seconds instead of minutes. We re-route traffic automatically and minimize the impact on your customers.

5. Security and Privacy: SYD1’s infrastructure equipment is deployed in a secure cage with floor-to-ceiling panels. No one other than a select few DigitalOcean employees have access to it.

The trust of our customers is important to us, and we comply with The Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), as well as provide SYD1-specific security certifications (ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and SOC). For more information, please see the following resources:

• The Australian Privacy Principles Fact Sheet

• Security Certifications

Why Sydney?

Sydney was a natural choice for our newest data center for multiple reasons, including the growing cloud computing market, a healthy startup and developer ecosystem, and its location in the Southern Hemisphere. According to the Deloitte Access Economics report, Australia is still at the beginning of its cloud journey, indicating a tremendous growth potential. The growing software developer landscape in Sydney coupled with the rich telecommunications connectivity options, including a vast array of submarine communications cables which connect directly to USA and Asia, made Sydney an ideal choice for DigitalOcean to set up a new data center location.

In addition, having a data center in Australia has been one of the most common requests from our customers over the past years. Here’s what our customers have to say about SYD1.

“I was excited to hear that we’ll have DigitalOcean’s reliability coming onshore to Australia. That will make a big impact for local businesses.”—Scott Purcell, Co-Founder, Director, Man of Many

DigitalOcean is focused on making it easier for businesses to deploy and scale their applications and we are extremely excited to see what we can build together in Australia. If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean in your business, click here to contact our sales team.

Spin up a Droplet in SYD1 today and let the fun begin!