AWS Unveils United Kingdom Cloud Region
London’s calling for AWS as Amazon CTO adds UK to list of Amazon’s global regions
Amazon Web Services is opening a new region in the UK. The region and its data centres will be the third such region in the EU, and will go hand in hand with regions in Dublin and Frankfurt to expand AWS’ European efforts in cloud computing.
AWS said it is hoping the region will be up and running by the end of 2016.
Low-latency
Announcing the news, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in a blog post entitled London Calling: “More startups, small and medium businesses, large enterprises, universities, and government organizations all over the world are moving to the AWS Cloud 
faster than ever before.
“The new region, coupled with the existing AWS regions in Dublin and Frankfurt, will provide customers with quick, low-latency access to websites, mobile applications, games, SaaS applications, big data analysis, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and more.”
Commenting on the news, the Government’s CTO Liam Maxwell said: “It’s great to see that Amazon Web Services will be providing commercial cloud services from data centres in the UK. Not only will this mean a significant investment in the UK economy, but means more healthy competition and innovation in the UK data centre market. This is good news for the UK government given the significant amount of data we hold that needs to be kept onshore.”
It was only yesterday when Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon that is predicted to hit revenues of $16bn in just two years, announced a string of data centres in South Korea.
The new region will be AWS’ twelfth region globally, and its fifth region in the Asia Pacific area.
Announcing the region on the AWS blog, Amazon top cloud evangelist Jeff Barr said: “The region-based AWS model has proven to be a good match for the needs of our global customer base.
“We have always believed that you need to be able to exercise complete control over where your data is stored and where it is processed.”
Customers
Vogels name-dropped a number of UK customers who he said were using the AWS cloud platform. They include the BBC, Shazam, Channel 4, Swiftkey and Unilever.
“Leading UK organisations 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,” said Vogels.
Indeed, if you’re a London local it would have been hard recently to miss Amazon’s AWS advertising campaign on the tube over the past few months. This, if anything, should have told us a new region was in the works in the UK.
