AWS completes Local Zone roll out, adds international locations as stepping stones outside of core regions
Amazon’s AWS has simultaneously announced the completion of its first sixteen AWS Local Zones in the US and said plans to build 32 new local zones internationally. Local Zones are a component of the AWS edge play, an important evolutionary step for the cloud provider which has traditionally used the scale of its massive centralized data centers to drive profits and product development for its customers.
AWS Local Zone is essentially an edge data center. The edge location will reside outside the regions where AWS currently has availability zones. The idea is to get local infrastructure closer to end users that require very low levels of latency (in the single-digit milliseconds). The first Local Zone location was in Los Angeles and AWS is primarily targeting the multi-player gaming, video editing and rendering, film, content creation, and machine learning industries.
The international locations listed with this announcement may be away from Amazon’s hubs in places like Northern Virginia and Dublin, but they are hardly remote, including as they do Amsterdam, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and Vancouver, places where there will be plenty of kind of media and gaming companies Amazon wants to target – or to keep.
Amazon likes to use Local Zones as a stepping stone for building out a full cloud node (what it calls Availability Zones). But the rapid build-out of Local Zones also shows us that there is clearly a demand for low latency compute at the edge that’s independent of the 5G MEC edge that is frequently highlighted as an edge computing use case.
Article Topics
5G | AWS | edge data center | MEC | public cloud | regional data center
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