AWS will add a Canadian region this year, along with ones in China, India and the U.K.
Pack your passport; Amazon’s cloud is going international.
Actually, it’s already international. But Amazon is making it even more global in 2016.
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The latest stop for the AWS world tour is Montreal, Canada, the company announced today. Also on the agenda for this year are new regions in China, India, Ohio and the United Kingdom. Overall, AWS has 32 availability zones in 12 regions.
Other cloud providers are expanding internationally too. Microsoft already has 22 regions around the world, with plans to add two regions in Canada and Germany each, plus one in the U.K. too.
AWS and Azure have different definitions of “regions” though. An AWS region has at least two data centers or “Availability Zones” each, allowing customers to architect highly available systems in a single region. Microsoft does not guarantee multiple data centers in each region.
Global expansion of data center’s isn’t a huge surprise for these IaaS providers. Their rapid growth necessitates data center regions closer to customers. More strict data privacy laws around the globe are another factor accelerating the geographic sprawl.
