(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Helping European developers and businesses achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources and meet data storage regulatory requirements, Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com) now lets clients run Amazon EC2 instances in Europe.
According to Amazon’s Tuesday announcement, Letting European customers have their data processed, stored and distributed in Europe.
More information was provided in a blog post by Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels, which states that the new “European Region” contains two “Availability Zones” that let developers build applications that can tolerate a variety of failure scenarios. This essentially lets European users cheaply and easily run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency as their US colleagues.
“One can even develop fail-over scenarios that will span multiple continents. Amazon Elastic Block Storage will also be available to our customers that launch instances in the European Region,” Vogels wrote. “With the European Regions of Amazon EC2, S3 and SQS, combined with Amazon CloudFront, developers now have a full set of services that can help them address the European market.”
European critics have already begun singing EC2′s praises, suggesting that other cloud service providers storm Europe.
A Financial Times blog post by Richard Waters notes, “Cloud computing, as we’ve said before, is still in its infancy, and big competitors with names like Microsoft, IBM and Google have their eye on the business. But having got to the market first, Amazon is wasting no time in taking its services global.”
Amazon Web Services product management and developer relations head Adam Selipsky told the Financial Times that a European version of its EC2 cloud platform was by far AWS’s Europe customers’ number one request.
“Finally EC2 EU has arrived,” RightScale (www.rightscale.com) stated in its official blog enthusiastically. “It looks like it has landed in Ireland (at least a quick trace route suggests that), I hope the Amazon team is ready for the customer onslaught!”
Right Scale, an Amazon partner, is currently preparing for its system to support Amazon’s EU region efforts within weeks. The blog states that the company is hard at work prepping its systems for the multi-region structure.
According to Amazon’s website, the per-hour fee for the European compute cloud is only 10 percent higher than in America.
