Jassy stated in his virtual briefing from Munich, “In Germany, we have thousands of customers of AWS who have been using AWS from other regions. And lots of customers have asked us to have a region here in Germany as they’d like to move to AWS but they feel they can’t do so until there is infrastructure in Germany.”
Fears regarding putting data in the cloud have heaped on since the Edward Snowden, former national security contractor’s revelations surfaced about the US government probing on consumers and businesses. Because of these concerns, there seems a reluctance by some international companies to put data in US data carriers and a wish for some US companies to store data outside the country.
Jassy addressed these concerns in his briefing by stating AWS significantly inspects any government demand for customer data and fervently fights what it believes to be straining government requests. Let’s suppose, if Amazon is required to hand over any customer data because of a subpoena, AWS informs the customer. There is just one way that the customer can protect their data is by encrypting it and holding the keys themselves, through a service Amazon calls Cloud Hardware Security Module (HSM), he added.
While, talking about the AWS regions, he said that it’s the company’s 11th region in Germany and the 2nd in Europe.
Moreover, besides privacy considerations, another reason for opening the German region is to enable European customers to spread workloads across regions. We are currently experiencing rapid growth in Europe that the New region will support, Jassy said.
The company’s EC2 virtual machines prices in the Frankurt region begin at $0.015 per hour, which is slightly higher than the $0.013 price for US-East VMs, but still less than the California ($0.017), Asia/Pacific (Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney are $0.020) and Sao Paulo ($0.027) regions. AWS has other regions in Oregon, Ireland, Beijing and a GovCloud region for government workloads.
When it comes to an AWS region, it comprises of multiple data centers, which are called as Availability Zones. The Frankfurt region has two AZs that run on carbon-neutral power.
Certainly, Amazon is not the first cloud provider with German data centers, with IBM and Fujitsu being among the others that do.
This is actually the second major news announcement from AWS this week. Earlier, the company announced AWS Directory Service that enables customers to store their authentication directories in Amazon’s cloud.
