Tag: Sydney

Categories
News Rackspace

Rackspace Cloud now available in Sydney, Australia

In August 2012, Rackspace announced that they were working on launching an Australian datacentre for their cloud offerings.

Today that dream is a reality, with the official announcement of their new Sydney-based datacentre:

Rackspace now have datacentres in 9 locations, including Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, and the USA.

Map of Rackspace Datacentre Locations
Image Credit: Rackspace Australia

I just logged into the Rackspace Control Panel, and here’s the proof:

Rackspace Control Panel - Add New Server
Rackspace Control Panel – Add New Server

I’ve invested many hours in AWS’ offerings, so I’m not planning on switching to Rackspace Cloud any time soon, but it is great to see more competition in the Australian-based cloud industry.

(AWS launched their Sydney datacentre in November 2012).

Categories
Amazon Web Services Cloud News Rackspace

Amazon Web Services now in Australia (Sydney)

Big news this morning:

Amazon Web Services has just launched an AWS region in Sydney, Australia!

The new Asia Pacific (Sydney) region supports almost all of AWS’ services including EC2, RDS, S3 and many more.

After launching an Australian Edge Location in June 2012 for Route 53 and CloudFront, I (along with many other Australian developers) have been waiting for AWS to launch a fully-fledged Australian region.

Whilst there are already some Australian-specific Cloud Computing offerings, this is a big day for us now that the AWS juggernaut has launched here.

Rackspace (another large cloud computing provider) has previously committed to launching a Syndey-based datacentre in 2012, however we are yet to see that launch.

Overall, I think that more competition in the Australian cloud industry can only be a good thing for us. It’s likely to help drive down the high costs of Australia’s high bandwidth/data.

Onwards and upwards!

Categories
Meetups WordPress

WordPress User Groups in Australia – Some Statistics

Below are some statistics that demonstrate how popular the WordPress user groups are in Australia:

Location Population Number of
Group Members		 % of Population
in Meetup Group
Hobart 216,276 93 0.0430%
Bendigo 89,666 23 0.0257%
Brisbane 2,146,577 342 0.0159%
Sydney 4,605,992 661 0.0144%
Melbourne 4,169,103 516 0.0124%
Canberra 367,752 42 0.0114%
Adelaide 1,262,940 81 0.0064%
Perth 1,832,114 66 0.0036%
Wollongong 288,101 9 0.0031%

As you can see, Hobart has the highest percentage of their population being a member of their user group. Well done Japh!

Here in Melbourne, it looks like we have some work to do.

Population Figures are sourced from Wikipedia as of 10 October 2012.

Number of Group Members Figures were sourced from each meetup.com group page as of 10 October 2012.

Categories
Cloud Rackspace

Rackspace to Launch Sydney Datacentre in 2012

Rackspace have just announced a Sydney-based datacentre, to be live by the end of 2012:

I’m looking forward to seeing increased competition in the Australian Cloud Hosting arena. Your turn now, AWS? 🙂

Update 22/8/2012 3:10pm: Rackspace have published details on the Sydney datacentre here.

Update 17/6/2013: Rackspace’s Sydney Datacentre is now online.

Categories
Conferences News WordPress

WordCamp Sydney 2012 Wrap-up

Last weekend I attended WordCamp Sydney 2012 at the beautiful University of Sydney Camperdown campus:

University of Sydney
The University of Sydney (photo credit)

The Statistics

There were approximately 230 people who attended the 2 day event. (Which makes WordCamp Sydney 2012 the biggest Australian WordCamp ever!)

WordCamp Sydney July 21-22, 2012

According to Eventifier, there were:

  • 110 Photos
  • 1 Video
  • 1916 Tweets
  • 245 Contributors

The Audience

In previous WordCamps that I’ve attended, the number of WordPress end-users have easily outnumbered the number of WordPress developers. However at WordCamp Sydney, the developer stream was packed, and there were (from memory) more developers than end-users.

Highlights

I particularly enjoyed Brent Shepherd’s Word to the Future presentation, and also Jeff Waugh’s TurboPress: The High Performance Guide to WordPress.

The major highlight for me was the conversations at the pub on the Saturday night. It was great to see so many passionate WordPress business owners discussing their problems, solutions, and even talking about future WordPress-related events in Australia.

I also enjoyed catching up with some familiar WordPress faces, and also meeting some really interesting people.

Thank You!

Being one of the organisers of WordCamp Melbourne 2011, it was fantastic to see WordCamp popularity in Australia continue to rise.

Thank you to all the organisers and volunteers – from my point of view the the event ran without a hitch!

Bring on the next Australian WordCamp 🙂