AWS Sydney data centre locations leaked

Julian Assange's Wikileaks website has published a document that reveals the locations of data centres housing cloud giant Amazon Web Services, circa 2015.

Equinix SYD3

The document provides the exact address of facilities around the world, including Australia.

Eight data centres in Sydney are listed in the document, with six being colo sites, and two sites operated by AWS itself. Wikileaks has published the full addresses, and names and phone numbers of contact people at the facilities.

The two AWS data centres are SYD51 in Eastern Creek and SYD52 in Smeaton Grange towards Campbelltown.

AWS also uses two colocated facilities run by Fujitsu, as well data centres operated by NEXTDC, Iseek-KDC, Global Switch, and Equinix.

They are mapped out by AWS as follows:

• SYD1: Equinix SYD3 in Alexandria.
• SYD4: Global Switch Ultimo.
• SYD5: Fujitsu Western Sydney Datacentre.
• SYD6: Iseek-KDC Gore Hill, Artarmon.
• SYD7: Fujitsu Sydney Datacentre, Homebush.
• SYD61: NextDC S1, Macquarie Park.

AWS' global affiliation with Equinix is well known and iTnews has often heard whispers of a NEXTDC affiliation. News of AWS-operated facilities is, however, new. 

The document is from late 2015, and marked with a "WARNING: This information is not public and is classified as Highly Confidential!"

Missing from the list are the AWS Edge Network facilities in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

AWS Edge Network locations offer access to services such as the CloudFront content delivery network, the Route 53 cloud domain name system as well the Firewall Manager, Shield distributed denial of service attack protection, and the Web Application Firewall (WAF).

In total, the document lists 116 AWS facilities around the world, with just over half of the data centres being located in the United States.

WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief justified the release on grounds that "It is important for the public to know where their data is stored. It should not be clouded in mystery. This is of increased importance when the company in question is contenting for a billion dollar government contract".

Or a ten-billion dollar contract, such as the JEDI contract for which the United States Department of Defence will soon make a decision. Google last week dropped out of the running for the deal while IBM and Oracle have both objected to aspects of the procurement process. AWS and Microsoft are felt to be the front-runners for the contract, which could run for ten years.

Just why WikiLeaks feels it is important for the public to know where data is stored is not explained, especially as most governments mandate onshore storage.