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AWS Brings Its Cloud Datacenter Footprint to Paris
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially opened its newest cloud region in France, an expansion of its European infrastructure over two years in the making.
The cloud giant first announced its plan to launch a region in Paris in the fall of 2016. In mid-December, the new Paris region became operational, making it the fourth active AWS region in Europe. The others are located in Ireland, Frankfurt and London.
The launch of the Paris region came just days after AWS opened its second region in China.
The Paris region has three availability zones. In AWS parlance, a region is a single, fully isolated location that contains at least two availability zones, which in turn contain one or more datacenters. AWS explains that this setup ensures high availability and fault-tolerance.
All together, AWS now has 49 active availability zones spread across 18 regions worldwide. The company also has plans to open at least four more regions comprising 12 availability zones by 2019. These previously announced plans include Bahrain (slated for early 2019), Hong Kong (sometime in 2018), Stockholm (2018), and a new GovCloud region in the eastern United States (2018).
AWS' announcement of the new region touted its compliance with the various data storage and privacy requirements that are mandated by the EU-US Privacy Shield and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the latter of which takes effect in May of this year. Some of these EU laws place restrictions on how and where companies based overseas can store data acquired within EU borders.
"We have tens of thousands of French customers using AWS from regions outside of France, but we've heard them loud and clear and are excited to deliver them an AWS Region in France, so they can easily operate their most latency-sensitive workloads or house any data that needs to reside on French soil," said AWS CEO Andy Jassy in a prepared statement.