New cloud computing region addresses latency, data security requirements, environmental concerns
AWS has announced plans to open a new cloud computing region in Canada, centered in the city of Calgary and province of Alberta. AWS Canada West (Calgary) is planned to come online in 2023 or 2024, according to a blog post from Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr.
The hyperscaler physically clusters its data centers operating outside the United States together in geographical “Regions.” Besides Canada, AWS has eight other regions operating or planned, including Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. AWS plans to launch the new India cloud region in 2022.
Amazon further subdivides the Regions into logical groups of data centers called Availability Zones (AZs). AZs provide redundancy, fault tolerance and scalability, according to AWS.
“An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking and connectivity in an AWS Region. AZs give customers the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault-tolerant and scalable than would be possible from a single data center,” said AWS.
“This three-AZ region will reduce latency for end-users in Western Canada and will also support the development of advanced, distributed solutions that span multiple AWS regions. It will also provide additional flexibility for AWS customers that need to store and process data within Canada’s borders,” said Barr.
AWS in Canada
The Canada (Central) Region launched in 2016. The region already comprises three Availability Zones. The company claims Air Canada, NHL, Lululemon and other prominent Canadian businesses as clients.
The new region is part of Amazon’s ongoing efforts capital investment efforts in Canada. It’s part of a CAD $4.3 billion plan that spans the next 15 years. Includes data center construction and operations, AWS predicts the efforts will add $4.9 billion to Canada’s GDP.
“With another AWS Region in Canada, customers will see even lower latency for emerging solutions like 5G-enabled applications and machine learning at the edge, and it will strengthen their ability to architect their regional infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AWS.
The business is also investing in Canadian renewable energy projects, according to Barr. He cited previously announced efforts including an 80 megawatt (MW) solar farm and a 375 MW solar farm, both of which will go online next year.
“Together, these projects will contribute more than one million MWh to the power grid when they come online in 2022,” said Barr.
AWS and Bell Canada partnered together in June on 5G edge services. Bell Canada will deploy AWS’ Wavelength service first in Toronto by the end of this year, followed by Montreal in the first quarter of 2022 and then Vancouver in spring 2022.
