Amazon Web Services has opened data centres in Frankfurt, Germany, marking the second EU region for the cloud platform after Ireland.
AWS SVP Andy Jassy said during a press conference: "Our Frankfurt region means customers will be able to store their data and use infrastructure from here in Germany."
Jess pinned the Frankfurt opening on the thousands of AWS customers in the country, as well as the expanding base of customers in Europe in general. Amazon’s first EU region, housed in Dublin, was opened in 2011. The data centres in Frankfurt make up the eleventh region for AWS globally.
Jassy said: "A lot of those customers asked us to have a region here in Germnay. We have a lot of large EU customers."
AWS has acknowledged data sovereignty is a hot issue in Germany, with the country deploying strict data protection laws. Firms are limited to what customer data they can store outside of the country. An AWS German region solves that problem as German customer data will be housed within the borders.
The data centre will also help AWS to reach more customers in Eastern Europe and the Middle East as there will be less latency between the region and its customers compared to previous closest data centres of Dublin and Singapore.
Jessy also spoke about the continual price cuts when it comes to the public cloud strategies of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS.
He said: "If you look at the history of AWS, and what we have consistently told customers we believe that cloud computing is going be a high volume, low margin business. We believe prices will continue to go down every year. If you look at Amazon Web Services’ pricing actions over the last eight and a half years, it’s been reflective of that.
"You should expect that to continue."
