Amazon Web Services (AWS), which launched a new cloud region in Ontario earlier this month, made Canada its home. It’s expanding its presence on the other side, this week.
AWS announced Wednesday the launch of its newest regional in London, England. It has two availability zones and is AWS’ third European region, after Ireland and Frankfurt.
“Our AWS Europe Region (London) is now open for business and we are excited that we can offer a complete range of services — starting with our foundational service stack in compute, storage and networking, to our more advanced solutions, and applications,” wrote Amazon.com’s CTO Werner Vogels in a blog posting.
AWS currently has 16 active regions and 42 availability zones worldwide. Each availability zone contains one or more datacenters. It plans to open regions in Paris, China and other countries by 2017. Here is a map of AWS’ global cloud infrastructure.
AWS evangelist Jeff Barr stated in a blog post that the London region supports the D2, M4, and T2 instance families. He also mentioned that the London region offers a wide range of AWS services including DynamoDB and Redshift, Kinesis, and CloudWatch.
Vogels pointed out that London, and the United Kingdom, is primed for AWS’ expansion due to the large number of financial services customers and partners there.
He wrote that “U.K. companies use AWS to innovate across different industries, such as energy and manufacturing, medicaments retail and media, and the U.K. is home of some of the most forward-thinking business.” He also added, “The British government is also helping drive innovation and has adopted a cloud-first policy to technology adoption.”
Vogels stated that AWS Europe (London Region) will allow many more U.K. enterprises, public sector, and startup customers to lower IT costs, address data location needs, and embark upon rapid transformations in critical areas such as Big Data analysis or Internet of Things.