AWS Extending Local Zones Globally to Support Low-Latency Applications

Amazon Web Services completed its first 16 AWS Local Zones in the U.S. and plans to launch in 32 new metropolitan areas in 26 countries, it said Wednesday. Local Zones are an “infrastructure deployment” putting compute, storage, database and other services at the edge of the cloud near large population, industry and information technology centers. They allow customers to use AWS services locally while connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS regions with “the same elasticity, pay-as-you-go model, application programming interfaces and toolsets," it said. Customers with applications that require ultra-low latency, such as remote real-time gaming, media and entertainment content creation, live video streaming, engineering simulations, augmented and virtual reality and machine learning inference at the edge want AWS infrastructure “closer to their end users to support a seamless experience,” it said. Customers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., and Seattle can use Local Zones to deliver applications requiring “single-digit millisecond latency,” AWS said. The company is rolling it out to metro areas in other parts of the world over the next two years so that customers can meet data residency requirements in regulated sectors like health care and life sciences, financial services and government, it said. AWS manages and supports Local Zones; customers won’t have to incur the expense and effort of procuring, operating, and maintaining infrastructure to support low-latency applications, it said.