AWS officially announces Local Zones in 32 new cities. As previously revealed, Brussels is among them.
At first a local data center in Belgium was not necessary, a few days later it was revealed that our country would get an AWS Local Zone after all. Now comes the official announcement for the arrival of AWS Local Zones to 32 new cities in 36 countries, including Brussels. AWS is building the small local data centers on European soil in Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Lisbon, Munich, Oslo, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw. Asia will also get Local Zones, as will Australia and South America. For now, the data centers were only available in the U.S., where the presence is also being expanded.
No full-fledged regions
Local Zones are not separate data center regions, but extensions of existing regions. They house a limited segment of overall AWS offerings and target customers requiring latency of less than 10 ms. The list of available services is similar to that of AWS Outposts. So you get RDS, EBS, EC2, ECS, EKS and S3, among others. AWS is still not revealing which region the Brussels area will fall under.
With the arrival of Local Zones, AWS is working to establish a physical presence in our country, although the cloud giant continues to lag considerably behind compared to Google and Microsoft. Google already has several data centers in Wallonia, with a sixth data center near Charleroi currently planned. Microsoft does plan to build a full Azure Region in our country with three Availability Zones around Brussels.