We learned something today: Amazon EC2 wasn’t available in Europe up until today. That’s news to us, because we thought it already was. Amazon Web Services just released a statement announcing that European developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances locally.

With today’s launch, European developers and businesses with European customers can take advantage of the latest features for Amazon EC2 including multiple Availability Zones, Elastic IP addresses, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). In the near future, Amazon EC2 will also add support for Windows Server and SQL Server in the EU which is a new feature that was recently introduced on Amazon EC2 in the U.S.

Amazon S3 had already been available for about a year in the EU, but it’s good to see the popular cloud computing service making its way across the Atlantic now, too.

For some reason, the prices for Amazon EC2 usage in Europe were mentioned in US dollars, so I took the liberty to convert them to Euro currency for our European readers:

Standard (per instance hour consumed)
€0.085 for small instances
€0.34 for large instances
€0.68 for x-large instances

High CPU (per instance hour consumed)
€0.17 for medium instances
€0.68 for x-large instances

Data Transfer
€0.077 per GB – all data transfer in
€0.13 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
€0.1 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
€0.085 per GB – next 100TB
€0.077 per GB – over 150T

If you’d like to compare this to US pricing, click here. Amazon says the prices in Europe are a bit higher because the increasing cost of running datacenters on the continent.

Update: I just had a chat with an Amazon representative and he confirmed the complete infrastructure is actually located in Ireland.