AWS Launches Infrastructure Region in Zurich

AWS Europe (Zurich) Region allows customers to run workloads and replicate applications and data across distinct groups of data centers called Availability Zones. This new Region has three fully redundant Availability Zones located in the vicinity of Zurich. It offers low-latency access to applications while meeting data residency requirements.

Regions and Availability Zones

AWS (Amazon Web Services) has the concept of a Region. Each Region is fully isolated from all other Regions. Within each Region, they have built Availability Zones. These Availability Zones are fully isolated partitions of their infrastructure that contain a cluster of data centers. Availability Zones are typically separated by multiple kilometers to mitigate the impact of disasters that could affect data centers. The distance between Availability Zones varies between Regions. The distance is large enough to avoid having data centers impacted by the same event at the same time but close enough to allow workloads with synchronous data replication. Availability Zones are linked by redundant, high-bandwidth, and low-latency network connections. Regions are linked by our custom-built, global, low-latency, private network with exabits per second of capacity in Europe.

Unlike other cloud providers, who often define a region as a single data center, the multiple Availability Zone design of every AWS Region offers advantages such as security, availability, performance, and scalability.

Continuous Investments in Switzerland

AWS has a long history of presence in Switzerland. They have worked with Swiss customers and partners since the launch of AWS 16 years ago. The first Swiss office was opened in Zurich in April 2016 to host the growing local team of technical and business professionals dedicated to supporting Swiss customers. In 2017, the AWS network was expanded into Switzerland with the launch of an Amazon CloudFront edge location and an AWS Direct Connect location. To support this growth, a second AWS office was opened in Geneva.

AWS plans to invest up to 5.9 billion Swiss francs in the Europe (Zurich) Region from 2022–2036 as they build, maintain, operate, and develop data centers to support the projected growth in demand for AWS technologies by our customers.

According to an AWS Economic Impact Study (EIS), this investment will contribute 16.3 billion Swiss francs to the GDP of Switzerland during the same period. This includes the value added by AWS services to the IT sector in Switzerland, as well as the direct, indirect, and induced effects of AWS purchases from the Swiss data center supply chain. The study estimates that this investment will support an average of 2,500 full-time jobs annually at external businesses in the Swiss data supply chain from 2022–2036.

Available Today

The new Region is available today on the AWS Management Console and for API calls.

Image source: AWS Economic Impact Study

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