AWS recently opened a new region in Spain to offer cloud services in the Iberian Peninsula and address in-country data residency and compliance requirements. The new eu-south-2 region is based in Aragón and has three availability zones.
The region will help Spanish businesses in highly regulated sectors like government, healthcare, and financial services that require storing data and running workloads locally. Marcia Villalba, principal developer advocate at AWS, writes:
In addition to the new Region in Spain, AWS currently has four Amazon CloudFront edge locations available in Madrid. And since 2016, customers can benefit from AWS Direct Connect locations to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data centers and offices. The Region in Spain also offers low-latency connections to other AWS Regions in the area.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-region-in-spain
The new region in Aragón was announced as "in the works" in 2019, as "coming soon" last summer, and it is now open to all customers, even if a few months later than planned. After the recent opening of the region in Zurich, Aragón is the eighth AWS region in Europe and the sixth one in the European Union, joining Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, and Milan. The cloud provider is Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) certified for government agencies and public organizations in Spain.
One of the topics of the announcement was sustainability. Villalba writes:
Sustainability is also very important for AWS (...) That is why in Spain, Amazon and AWS currently have two operational renewable energy projects delivering clean energy into the Spanish grid to support the region and Amazon's logistics network in the country.
Some developers question the lack of details and wonder if the new region is "net zero". Aerin Booth, founder of Cloud Sustainably, writes:
Good luck finding out! AWS does not publish region-level sustainability information.
AWS is not the only cloud provider targeting the Iberian Peninsula. Google launched a new Spanish cloud region in Madrid earlier this year in partnership with Telefónica. Similarly, Oracle partnered with the Spanish mobile carrier to open a region last September. In 2020 Microsoft announced plans for a "game changer" region in Madrid in partnership with Telefónica but the region is still marked as "coming soon".
AWS now offers 29 regions around the world with 93 availability zones. The cloud provider plans to open soon six regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand.