AWS Moves Into Canada With New Central Region

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially opened a new Canada (Central) Region that will benefit Canadian customers and some parts of the northern United States.

The cloud giant’s absence from Canada had been curious, but it first disclosed plans to expand to the great white north back in January – just a day after Silicon pondered why the country did not have a dedicated region.

The Montral, Quebec-based facility will offer the full suite of AWS infrastructure services and supports  all sizes of C4, D2, M4, T2, and X1 instances and key services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, NAT Gateway, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.

Canada Calling

Chief AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said: “Today’s launch brings our global footprint to 15 regions and 40 availability zones, with seven more availability zones and three more regions coming online through the next year.”

“As part of our on-going focus on making cloud computing available to you in an environmentally friendly fashion, AWS data centres in Canada draw power from a grid that generates 99 percent of its electricity using hydropower.”

Barr also shared a series of latency metrics to cities in Canada and the US. For Canadian cities, the timings stand at, 9 ms to Toronto, 14 ms to Ottawa, 47 ms to Calgary, 49 ms to Edmonton and 60 ms to Vancouver.

Whitepaper: The zero trust data centre in action

For locations in the US, Amazon calculates the metrics as 9 ms to New York, 19 ms to Chicago, 16 ms to US East (Northern Virginia), 27 ms to US East (Ohio) and a mere 75 ms to US West (Oregon), giving companies expanded reach without the worry of a speed decrease.

AWS has been working hard to spread its services in the last couple of months, having recently opened a new region in Ohio. It is also moving forward with its UK-based data centre plans and  is planning to expand into France into 2017.

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