Amazon Web Services has launched a new availability region in Sweden. The region consists of three data centres built within an hour’s train travel from Stockholm.
AWS regions are locations where Amazons cloud-based infrastructure is located. Regions are made up of a few ‘Availability Zones’ which are essentially the locations of AWS data centres.
Last year AWS announced that they would be building new infrastructure in the Swedish towns of Västerås, Eskilstuna and Katrineholm. It is these locations that comprise the new AWS region dubbed the Stockholm region.
Each data centre will operate on an independent power supply, as well as running its own cooling and security systems.
Andy Jassy Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Web Services commented in a released statment that: “Tens of thousands of Nordic customers have been using AWS from regions around the world, but many have shared that they also wanted an AWS Region in the Nordics so they can easily operate their most latency-sensitive workloads for end-users in the Nordics while meeting any data sovereignty requirements.”
AWS Region
The Stockholm AWS region brings the company’s total region count to 20, with Amazon operating data centres in 60 zones globally.
AWS is expecting to increase this number by the year 2020, as they are currently in the process of building infrastructure for four new regions in Bahrain, Italy, South Africa and Hong Kong SAR. Amazon is expect to construct 12 data centres to supply these four regions with data services.
The launch of the new region in Sweden will be welcomed by AWS Nordic customers as it will provide them with a low-latency service when using AWS products. It also offers Swedish enterprises the chance to outsource their data storage within their home country.
Welcoming the announcement was current Swedish AWS customer Volvo Group Connected Solutions (VGCS). Gothenburg-based VGCS is responsible with harvesting and managing data gathered from across the Volvo group. Over 700,000 Volvo Group vehicles are transmitting data to VGCS which it manages and analysis within AWS datacentres.
VGCS employees over 100,000 people and has production facilities in 18 countries. Products developed using the data insights are sold in over 18 countries.
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Stefan Berggren VP of Technology at Volvo Group Connected Solutions commented that: “AWS has transformed how we run as a business, helping us move to a micro service architecture and run infrastructure as code, which has increased automation across the organization.”
“Since moving the development of our applications to AWS, we have increased agility and speed and reduced the amount of time it takes to go from idea to experimentation from weeks to minutes. As you can imagine, latency is also vital when connecting vehicles and delivering a broad range of connected services to our customers. We look forward to using the new AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region because it will bring our services even closer to our customers.”
