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AWS To Open Stockholm Region in 2018
Amazon Web Services' European expansion continues apace, with the company announcing the planned launch of a new region in Stockholm, Sweden, next year.
The Stockholm region will join four other AWS regions in Europe -- Ireland, which opened a full decade ago; Frankfurt, which launched in 2014; London, the newest, having opened late last year; and Paris, which is expected to open by year's end.
In AWS parlance, a region is a single location that contains one or more availability zones, which in turn contain one or more datacenters. The upcoming Stockholm region will have three availability zones, according to a blog post Tuesday by Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels, bringing the total number of European availability zones to 13 by the time it opens.
This, in addition to the two dozen edge network locations that AWS has in Europe, means good news for European businesses that require a high degree of fault tolerance in their applications, as well as flexibility with regard to where they can legally store their cloud data, Vogels contended.
"After the launch of the AWS EU (Stockholm) Region, there will be 13 Availability Zones in Europe for customers to build flexible, scalable, secure, and highly available applications. It will also give customers another region where they can store their data with the knowledge that it will not leave the EU unless they move it," he wrote.
AWS is positioning the launch of a Stockholm region as a strategic move, given the country's reputation as a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. As AWS evangelist Jeff Barr noted in a separate blog post, Sweden was named the "EU Innovation Leader" in 2016 by the European Commission.
Vogels added that the wider Nordic region is home to a growing stable of major AWS customers, including furniture giant IKEA, airline companies Finnair and WOW air, game developers Mojang and Supercell, and commercial vehicle manufacturer Scania. AWS has significantly built up its presence in the area in response, he said.
"In 2011, AWS opened a Point of Presence (PoP) in Stockholm to enable customers to serve content to their end users with low latency," Vogels said. "In 2014 and 2015 respectively, AWS opened offices in Stockholm and Espoo, Finland. We have also added teams in the Nordics to help customers of all sizes as they move to AWS, including account managers, solutions architects, business developers, partner managers, professional services consultants, technology evangelists, start-up community developers, and more."
Many high-profile AWS partners also have operations in the Nordic region, including Accenture, Tieto, Wipro and Capgemini.
Currently, the number of live AWS regions stands at 16, comprising 42 availability zones. Besides Paris and Stockholm, the company also plans to open a new region in China later this year. These three forthcoming regions will combine for an additional eight availability zones. A map of AWS' global datacenter infrastructure is available here.