Posted On: Feb 5, 2024

Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new AWS Local Zone in Houston, Texas. This new Local Zone supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C6i, M6i, R6i, and C6gn instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types gp2, gp3, io1, sc1, and st1. You can also access Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Application Load Balancer, and AWS Direct Connect in this new Local Zone to support a broad set of workloads at the edge.

Local Zones are an AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists. You can use Local Zones to run applications that require single-digit millisecond latency for use cases such as real-time gaming, hybrid migrations, media and entertainment content creation, live video streaming, engineering simulations, and AR/VR.

AWS Local Zones are available in the US in 15 other metro areas and globally in an additional 17 metros areas, allowing you to deliver low-latency applications to end users worldwide. For more information about where other Local Zones are available, visit Local Zones locations.

You can enable the new Local Zone in Houston (us-east-1-iah-2a) from the Zones tab in the Amazon EC2 console settings or the ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API. Check out Local Zones pricing for information on Amazon EC2 instances available as On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, or part of Savings Plans in the new Local Zone in Houston. To learn more, visit Local Zones.