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AWS Cloud Expands North into Canada
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) officially flipped the switch on its first Canadian region this month.
"We are growing the AWS footprint once again. Our new Canada (Central) Region is now available and you can start using it today," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post last week announcing the new region.
The Canada region, located in Montreal, is the latest in a string of new cloud datacenter infrastructure that AWS has announced this year. Earlier in 2016, the company launched new regions in Seoul and Mumbai and, more recently, in Columbus, Ohio. It also has plans to open regions in Paris, London and China before the end of 2017.
(Update, 12/14: The London region is now open. Read the story here.)
Including Canada, AWS now has 15 regions in operation worldwide, comprising 40 availability zones. The three forthcoming regions will bring an additional seven availability zones. (In AWS parlance, a region describes a single location that contains one or more availability zones, which in turn contain one or more datacenters.) A map of AWS regions -- both live and still to come -- is available here.
The new region supports C4, D2, M4, T2 and X1 instances, according to Barr, as well as a slew of AWS services, including the new Shield Standard security solution that AWS launched at its recent re:Invent conference.
The Canada region also builds on AWS' recent efforts toward greener computing, Barr noted. The new region's datacenters will be powered by an electrical grid "that generates 99% of its electricity using hydropower," he said. It's also one of AWS' five carbon-neutral regions, according to this sustainability page.
"With the launch of the Canada (Central) Region, AWS will enable enterprise customers and startups, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations in Canada to deploy innovative and cost-effective IT solutions in areas such as big data, machine learning, serverless computing, mobile, and more," wrote Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in a blog post. "Millions of AWS customers have recognized the value of the cloud. The new Canada (Central) Region provides a high-performance, enterprise-grade, scalable, and secure way for Canadian organizations to do the same."