AWS Opens UK Data Centres With New London Region

Sam Pudwell,
London

AWS long-awaited UK data centres go live with launch of London region for public cloud

Fresh from its move into Canada earlier this week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has now extended its reach even further with the opening of a new London region in the United Kingdom.

AWS had hoped to open the region before the end of the year, although Silicon understands the window was between November and February.

The new region – AWS’ third in Europe after Ireland and Frankfurt – will enable businesses to store data closer to home and benefit from local privacy regulations, a boon for regulated industries.

The London region supports all sizes of C4, D2, M4, T2, and X1 instances and AWS users will have access to the full range of infrastructure services, such as Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

Read More: AWS  pitches UK data centres and security automation to British customers

UK Flag

London calling

Chief AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said rail ticket retailer Trainline, building materials supplier Travis Perkins and JustEat would be among the initial tranche of UK customers benefiting from the opening.

He also drew attention to the issue of compliance and explained how AWS has worked to make sure the region is suitable for government use: “The UK Government recognises that local data centres from hyper scale public cloud providers can deliver secure solutions for OFFICIAL workloads. 

“In order to meet the special security needs of public sector organisations in the UK with respect to OFFICIAL workloads, we have worked with our Direct Connect Partners to make sure that obligations for connectivity to the Public Services Network (PSN) and N3 can be met.”

All in all it’s been an extremely successful 2016 for AWS, with the company experiencing significant growth throughout the year and dominating the worldwide public IaaS market from the likes of Microsoft and Google.

However, with Microsoft pushing hard to keep up in Europe through the opening of its own German and UK regions, AWS can’t afford to stand still. It has already announced plans to open a region in Paris next year and, with more and more niche providers entering the market, competition is definitely heating up.

Google has also committed to a UK data centre and IBM has detailed its own significant British data centre expansion.

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