AWS (Amazon Web Services, Inc.) has announced the launch of its new AWS EU region in Frankfurt, Germany. The new cloud hosting region is the 11th technology infrastructure region globally for AWS and the second region in the European Union (EU), joining the AWS EU (Ireland) cloud region.
The new AWS EU (Frankfurt) cloud hosting region consists of two separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to datacenters in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network.
AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance. For customers looking for inter-region redundancy, the new AWS EU (Frankfurt) cloud hosting region, in conjunction with the AWS EU (Ireland) region, gives them flexibility to architect across multiple AWS regions within the EU.
“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services (AWS). “By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we’re enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth.”
As with every AWS cloud hosting region, customers can run applications on infrastructure located in Germany knowing that their content will stay within the region they choose.
ISO 27001, SOC 1, PCI DSS Level 1
Academics in Germany were quick to welcome the new region, “The arrival of an Amazon Web Services Region in Germany marks an important occasion for the German business and technology community,” said Prof. Dr Helmut Krcmar, Vice Dean of the Computer Science Faculty, and Chair of Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich. “We work with a number of DAX listed companies in Germany. Many have been holding off moving sensitive workloads to the cloud until they had computing and service facilities on German soil as this could help them comply with their internal processes. This new region from AWS answers this and we expect to see innovation amongst Germany, and Europe’s, companies flourish as a result.”
All AWS infrastructure regions around the world are designed, built, and regularly audited to meet rigorous compliance standards, including ISO 27001, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), PCI DSS Level 1, and many more, providing high levels of security for all AWS customers. AWS is fully compliant with all applicable EU Data Protection laws, and for customers that require it, AWS provides data processing agreements to help customers comply with EU data protection requirements.
