On October 23, Amazon Web Services announced the launch of its 11th region in the form of the AWS EU (Frankfurt) region. The AWS EU (Frankfurt) region is the second region in Europe and will contain two Availability Zones upon launch. The availability of the AWS EU (Frankfurt) region helps German organizations comply with EU data protection requirements that impose constraints on the storage of data across national boundaries. JP Schmetz, Chief Scientist of Hubert Burda Media, remarked on the announcement as follows:
Now that AWS is available in Germany it gives our subsidiaries the option to move certain assets to the cloud. We have long had policies preventing data to be hosted outside of German soil and this new German region gives us the option to use AWS more meaningfully.
As Schmetz notes, German customers who have internal policies requiring intra-national hosting of data can now leverage the services of Amazon Web Services. In addition, German organizations who currently use AWS can now more fully take advantage of the AWS platform’s offerings by expanding the scope of their usage to include production-grade workloads and sensitive data. The AWS EU (Frankfurt) region represents the second AWS region in Europe alongside AWS EU (Ireland) region. AWS EU (Frankfurt) is expected to reduce latency for European customers and provide additional options for the architecture of disaster recovery solutions, in addition to enabling select German customers feel more comfortable about hosting data on AWS and achieve compliance with their own internal organizational policies with respect to data hosting and data storage.
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