AWS announced the availability of Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami to serve latency-sensitive and throughput-sensitive workloads. The first AWS Local Zone was previously opened in Los Angeles. AWS has now announced plans to open an additional 12 Local Zones in 2021 in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle.
Currently, AWS spans 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones, which each comprise of one or more data centers and are located in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networking.
AWS Local Zones, which are managed and supported by AWS, are designed to support ultra-low latency applications. AWS Local Zones provide customers a high-bandwidth, secure connection between their local workloads and those running in the closest AWS Region. Customers can use the same AWS APIs and tools to run latency-sensitive workloads nearby to end-users, while seamlessly connecting to the full range of services in the AWS Region.
AWS says the vast majority of customers get the necessary performance for their applications in public AWS Regions, however, its Local Zone options will be better for applications such as remote real-time gaming, machine learning inference, and live video streaming. Previously, developers had to build and run these low latency application components with a different set of APIs and tools than the other parts of their applications running in AWS.
In Southern California, AWS reports single-digit latency to end-users located in the Southern California area.
“Whether your organization has been all-in on the cloud since day one or is just beginning to move workloads to the cloud, all customers want to optimize for price performance,” said Dave Brown, Vice President, EC2, AWS. “As customers bring more and more workloads to the cloud, AWS continues to expand the industry’s leading compute portfolio to meet their increasingly diverse needs. With the new EC2 instance types, AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones options we’re introducing today, we’re providing customers with an unmatched breadth and depth of capabilities to help them innovate more cost-effectively, with the right compute for the right job.”
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/localzones
