Preparing for last week’s Equinix U.S. roadshows on the Asia-Pacific cloud was a useful reminder of just how vast the Asia Pacific region really is. I’ve visited the area in person a few times, travelling from London to Auckland via Los Angeles, and London to Sydney or Canberra via Bangkok or Hong Kong. It doesn’t seem to matter which way you go; the second leg (across the Pacific from Los Angeles, or across assorted bits of water and the bulk of Australia from south-east Asia) takes as long as the (already ridiculously long) first part of the journey. Like other cloud providers, Amazon already has data centers in Singapore and Japan, but either of those is a huge distance from Australia or New Zealand. It’s been rumored for a while that Amazon might open a third data center in the southern Pacific,  and ITNews today reports that the company is advertising for a Sydney-based data center manager. A physical data center will presumably follow.