AWS Plans To Launch A UK Region By The End Of 2016

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is aggressively expanding the number of different geographic regions it offers its services in. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announced today, the company plans to launch a UK region by the end of 2016 (“or early 2017”).

That’s Amazon’s third region in the European Union. Amazon’s facilities in Dublin were long the only option for European developers who wanted to host their applications close to their home markets. AWS then launched its first region in Frankfurt, Germany last year.

The announcement of the upcoming UK region comes only a day after AWS also announced that the company plans to launch a region in South Korea, too (its fifth in the Asia-Pacific region). In addition, the company plans to add a new region in India, a second region in China and a new one in Ohio in 2016. Not counting these planned regions, AWS currently offers its services in eleven regions.

For both the UK and South Korea, Amazon argues that it already has a lot of customers in these markets. “Leading UK organizations were among the early adopters of the cloud when we first started AWS back in 2006 and we continue to help them drive increased agility, lower IT costs, and easily scale globally,” Vogel wrote today.

With a total of about twenty regions, Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform currently offers the largest number of regions. Google’s Cloud Platform features data centers in four regions (two in the U.S., one in Belgium and one in Taiwan). Developers generally want to host their applications as close to their users as possible to keep latency low. In countries like Germany, local data sovereignty laws also force some developers to ensure that their users’ data doesn’t leave the country.