Amazon may be opening a German data centre to aid its public cloud offering in Europe, according to a German mobile marketing startup employee who found an AWS end node.
Nils Jünemann, VP operations at Bitplaces, wrote in a blog post: "A traceroute to ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com is showing us that the traffic is going to Frankfurt am Main."
Currently, Amazon just has a European data centre located in Ireland, with ‘edge locations’ supporting operations in Warsaw, Madrid, Paris and London among other places. But a full-blown data centre on the mainland would reduce latency for customers in central Europe.
CBR reached out to Amazon Web Services asking whether or not it will be opening a German data centre.
Amazon replied: "We’re constantly getting feedback from customers on where they would like the next Amazon Region and have a long list of target countries we are looking at.
"We’re always re-evaluating and reprioritizing that list and Germany is one of the many countries that we are currently looking at. In the fullness of time you can expect Amazon Regions in multiple major countries around the world."
Jünemann said in his blog post: "In March Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services Unit said to the Wallstreet Journal, that Germany is "one of the few countries" where customers are asking for a data center "on their own soil". This news is now 4 month[s] old and it looks like that a German AWS region is finally arriving."
However, it may not just be a latency issue that is prompting Amazon to consider a German data centre.
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Germany’s reaction to NSA spying has been one of the strongest in Europe, and a German data centre would solve the issue of where exactly data on German citizens is stored, that is, inside of the country.
