With three Availability Zones, AWS’s eighth European region opens in Aragón
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Wednesday that its first region in Spain is now operational. The eu-south-2 region is located in the city of Aragón. It’s the 29th region AWS has opened globally, and the eighth for Europe, behind Zurich, Switzerland, which AWS announced earlier this month.
Regions are the highest level of AWS cloud infrastructure hierarchy – each AWS region is a separate geographical area. The company groups cloud computing resources by region to isolate them as a means of achieving high levels of fault tolerance and stability. Within each region are “Availability Zones” (AZs).
“Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones,” said Amazon.
AWS instructs its customers looking for the highest level of app availability to deploy their cloud apps across multiple AZs; each AZ is a fully isolated partition of AWS infrastructure containing one or more data centers, each with independent power, cooling, and physical security. They exist to provide AWS customers with redundancy to help avoid disruption associated with natural disasters, power grid failures and other circumstances that can affect cloud app availability.
AWS principal developer advocate Marcia Villalba explained that while AWS’s Spain region is new, the company has already been deploying extensive infrastructure in Spain. The company already counts four edge computing locations in Madrid and has operated “Direct Connect” locations to provide private connectivity for Spanish enterprise clients since 2016.
AWS’ move into Spain will help to address concerns for businesses look to keep data local, either to address regulatory requirements around data sovereignty and customer privacy, Villalba noted.
“The new AWS Europe (Spain) Region is a natural progression for AWS to support the tens of thousands of customers on the Iberian Peninsula. The Region will support our customers’ most mission-critical workloads by providing lower latency to end users across Iberia and meeting data residency needs (now customers can store their data in Spain),” she wrote.
Amazon said the new region complies with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). What’s more, AWS has been Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) High certified, thus achieving “the highest levels of security and compliance for government agencies and public organizations in Spain.”
Amazon anticipates that the new Spain region will support 1,300 full-time jobs annually. The company has committed to spending €2.5 billion (US$2.59 billion) over the next decade, in Spain. AWS’s efforts in Spain also include the creation of a $150,000 fund to support local community projects in Aragón, the company said.
Amazon said that it has plans to launch a dozen and a half more AZ’s across six regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand.
Europe isn’t the only place Amazon is expanding its footprint. In September, Amazon announced its UAE region, its second in the Middle East behind Bahrain. The company is building a third Middle East region in Israel.
Amazon and other hyperscalers, including Google and Microsoft ,are in the midst of a global buildout of their cloud infrastructure. The push worldwide for digitalization is coming from enterprises, regional governments and others, despite the current economic uncertainty that simultaneously is causing some hyperscalers to institute hiring freezes and layoffs.
