AWS recently announced the availability of the 28th region in Zurich, Switzerland, also known by its API name eu-central-2.
The new region joins the existing EU regions in Europe in cities like Ireland (eu-west-1), London (eu-west-2), Stockholm (eu-north-1), and Frankfurt (eu-central-1). The new region has three fully redundant Availability Zones located in the vicinity of Zurich.
Various customers in Switzerland, such as Fisch Asset Management, Helvetia, Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (RSI), Swiss Post, Swisscom, and Swisstopo, are using services from Amazon. In an AWS news blog post, Sébastien Stormacq, a principal developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, explains the benefit of the new region in Switzerland:
It offers your customers low-latency access to your applications while meeting your data residency requirements.
Customers can deploy their workloads to the region and use various EC2-instance and a long list of AWS services. However, a respondent on a Reddit thread stated:
Missing:
- EFS
- FSX
- EKS
- Many new EC2 instance types (e.g. r6i)~ 10% more expensive than eu-central-1 (Frankfurt)
The company plans to invest an estimated $5.9 billion (approx. 5.9 billion Swiss francs) in Switzerland during the next 15 years through the new AWS Europe (Zurich) region. Furthermore, according to an AWS Economic Impact Study (EIS), this investment will contribute 16.3 billion Swiss francs (approximately $16.3 billion) to the GDP of Switzerland during the same period – and support an average of 2,500 full-time jobs annually at external businesses in the Swiss data supply chain from 2022–2036.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/local/switzerland/
Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS, said in a press release:
With the new AWS Europe (Zurich) region, we have seven AWS Regions and 21 Availability Zones across Europe in Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, and now Zurich. This is a continuation of our investment to support customers of all kinds, help startups scale and grow, enable technical skills development, and help organizations create cloud-powered applications that reinvent services for end users.
Increasing the number of regions demonstrates that AWS continues to expand and is no different from its competitors. Google and Microsoft also continue to grow their regions. Google recently announced three new regions in Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand, while Microsoft made Azure regions available in China.
Werner Vogels, CTO of AWS, wrote in his blog about the new region in Switzerland:
Now the cloud is everywhere – it is around us. AWS covers 6 continents, 28 Regions, and 90 Availability Zones. Access to infrastructure is no longer a bottleneck for innovation.
Lastly, the region is available on the AWS Management Console.