In December last year, AWS announced the launch of over 30 new AWS Local Zones in significant cities worldwide, however yet not disclosing which cities. The company now announced the completion of its first 16 AWS Local Zones in the U.S. and plans to launch new AWS Local Zones in 32 new metropolitan areas in 26 countries worldwide.
The first AWS Local Zones are in 16 cities in the United States (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle). Over the next two years, the company intends to complete new AWS Local Zones in Amsterdam, Athens, Auckland, Bangkok, Bengaluru, Berlin, Bogotá, Brisbane, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Chennai, Copenhagen, Delhi, Hanoi, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kolkata, Lima, Lisbon, Manila, Munich, Nairobi, Oslo, Perth, Prague, Querétaro, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna, and Warsaw.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/localzones/locations/?nc=sn&loc=3
Customers can benefit from lower latency and the ability to meet data residency requirements in regulated sectors such as health care and life sciences, financial services, and government by using Local Zones. Furthermore, AWS manages these zones, saving customers the cost and effort of procuring, operating and maintaining infrastructure in multiple cities to support low-latency applications. Finally, customers can connect to AWS Local Zones via the internet or use AWS Direct Connect to route traffic over a private AWS network connection.
AWS Local Zones are an infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services close to a large population and industrial centers. These zones enable customers to use core AWS services locally while seamlessly connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS Regions - maintaining the same elasticity, pay-as-you-go model, application programming interfaces (APIs), and toolsets.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/localzones/
AWS Local Zones are somewhat related to cloud regions, and availability zones, except they do not have the full array of AWS services, but offer compute, storage, database, and other core services. Local Zones are basically an extension of an Availability Zone for applications requiring low latency, such as video streaming, real-time gaming, augmented and virtual reality applications.
Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS, said in an AWS press release of the Local Zones:
With the success of our first Local Zones in 16 U.S. cities, we are expanding to more locations for our customers worldwide who have asked for these same capabilities to push the edge of cloud services to new places.
In addition, Jean-Francis Ahanda, head of innovation & cloud services at ST Digital, tweeted:
More locations, more AWS -- AWS Steps Up Edge Investment, Will Add 32 Local Zones Across the World: Netflix among clients leveraging low-latency cloud in new places.
In the end, AWS Local Zones are all about supporting the edge computing movement by bringing AWS infrastructure closer to the action and providing companies with more flexibility in terms of infrastructure configuration.
