AWS in Switzerland and Austria (Alps)
2Y Anniversary – News About AWS Europe (Zurich) Region
November 2024 marked two years since we launched the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region, bringing AWS infrastructure to Switzerland with three Availability Zones and two Direct Connect locations. This robust infrastructure enables customers to build highly available and fault-tolerant applications while maintaining data residency within Switzerland. Since our launch, we’ve demonstrated our commitment to Swiss customers by expanding our service portfolio from 58 to 161 services, providing a comprehensive suite of cloud capabilities to meet diverse business needs.
Following our previous updates throughout H1 2023, Q3 2023, Q1 2024, we’re pleased to share the latest developments in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region. This update particularly focuses on AI/ML offerings, which are in high demand among Swiss customers looking for advanced cloud solutions.
Expanding AI/ML Capabilities in Switzerland
In response to customer demand for AI/ML services in Switzerland, we’ve launched key services including Amazon SageMaker Studio and Amazon Bedrock. These strategic additions enable customers to train and host ML models within Switzerland’s geographical boundaries while processing data using state-of-the-art large language models. Customers can now access features that remove the heavy lifting typically associated with integrating machine learning into applications, allowing them to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.
Amazon SageMaker provides a fully managed service that brings together essential ML tools in a unified integrated development environment (IDE). This comprehensive platform enables developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy ML models at scale, streamlining the entire ML workflow from experimentation to production. Additionally, SageMaker supports the operationalization of existing models, including those from popular repositories like Hugging Face, making it easier for customers to leverage pre-trained models while maintaining data sovereignty within Switzerland. The AI/ML services and features recently launched in AWS Europe (Zurich) Region include:
| Service / Feature | Description |
| Amazon EC2 G6 instances | Instances powered by 1-8 NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs |
| Amazon Bedrock | Build and scale generative AI applications |
| Agents | Orchestrate and execute multistep tasks |
| Guardrails | Implement safeguards to filter harmful content, redact sensitive information (PII), safeguard against prompt attacks, or detect hallucinations |
| Knowledge Bases | Fully managed support for end-to-end Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow |
| Prompt flows | Quickly create workflows by leveraging generative AI |
| Prompt management | Easily share prompts for use in generative AI applications |
| Model Evaluation | evaluate, compare, and select the best foundation models |
| SageMaker Studio V2 | Single web-based interface for end-to-end ML development |
| SageMaker CodeEditor | Code Editor, based on Code-OSS, Visual Studio Code – Open Source |
| SageMaker Feature Store | Managed service for machine learning features |
| SageMaker Images | Docker images available on SageMaker Studio that include popular frameworks for machine learning, data science, and visualization |
| SageMaker JupyterLab | The JupyterLab application is a web-based interactive development environment (IDE) for notebooks, code, and data |
| SageMaker Model Cards | Document critical details about your machine learning (ML) models in a single place |
| SageMaker Model Monitor | Monitors the quality of Amazon SageMaker machine learning models in production |
| SageMaker Neo | Optimizes machine learning models for inference |
| SageMaker Notebook Jobs | Run your notebook as a noninteractive, scheduled job |
| SageMaker Pipelines | Serverless workflow orchestration service purpose-built for MLOps and LLMOps automation |
| SageMaker Repository Service | Git-based service to manage source code for machine learning projects |
Additional Services, Features, and Instance Types
| Service / Feature / Instance Type | Description |
| Amazon API Gateway supports Custom Domain Name for private REST APIs | Provides custom user-friendly private DNS names and control over the lifecycle of your domain related TLS certificates |
| Amazon API Gateway WebSocket APIs | Bidirectional WebSockets for API Gateway |
| Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift | Within seconds data being written into Amazon Aurora is available in Amazon Redshift (Datawarehouse) |
| Amazon CloudWatch RUM | Real user monitoring (RUM) telemetry on web applications |
| Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) | Create a volume from a snapshot that is fully initialized at creation |
| Amazon EC2 R6gd instances | Instances powered by ARM-based AWS Graviton2 processors |
| Amazon MWAA (Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow) | Secure and highly available managed workflow orchestration for Apache Airflow |
| Amazon OpenSearch Serverless | Deliver search and log analytics without provisioning and adjusting resources |
| Amazon QuickSight | Business Analytics Service (Dashboards) |
| Amazon RDS for Oracle supports managed Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups | Reverse the roles between the primary database and a replica with no data loss and a brief outage |
| Amazon RDS Proxy | Make your applications more scalable, resilient, and secure |
| Amazon RDS Snapshot Export to S3 | Export any RDS snapshot in Apache Parquet format |
| Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling | Automatically and elastically scales query processing power |
| Amazon Redshift Serverless | Get insights from data in seconds without having to manage data warehouse infrastructure |
| Amazon VPC Lattice | Simplify service-to-service connectivity, security, and monitoring |
| Announcing the general availability of AWS Backup logically air-gapped vault | Logically air-gapped vaults in AWS Backup provide enhanced security and flexibility for backup storage |
| AWS Backup expands cross-account management in opt-in Regions | manage and monitor backups across AWS accounts with AWS Organizations |
| AWS Application Load Balancer introduces header modification | Ability to centrally enforce your organizations security posture at the load balancer |
| AWS Backup adds cross-Region, cross-account copy for SAP HANA | Supports for cross-Region and cross-account backup for SAP HANA on EC2 |
| AWS Cloud WAN and AWS Network Manager | A centralized way to create and manage global networks across AWS and on-premises locations |
| AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) expands DMS homogeneous data migrations | Provides simple and performant like-to-like migrations with minimal downtime |
| AWS DataSync supports agentless cross-region data transfers | Agentless data transfer between AWS Storage services in any region in the commercial partition |
| AWS Glue Studio data preparation experience | Spreadsheet-style UI that runs data integration jobs at scale |
| AWS Glue Studio Notebooks | Allows you to interactively author jobs in a notebook interface based on Jupyter Notebooks |
| AWS Incident Detection and Response | Proactive management for critical workloads |
| AWS Lambda console now features a new code editor (VS Code – Open Source) | VS Code – Open Source based code editor in the Lambda console |
| AWS Lambda now supports Amazon MQ for ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ | AWS Lambda now supports triggers from Amazon MQ for ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ |
| AWS Launch Wizard now adds programmatic deployments | Deploying AWS resources for third party applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server Always On and HANA based SAP systems |
| AWS Management Console – myApplications | Extension of Console Home that helps you manage and monitor the cost, health, security posture, and performance of your applications on AWS |
| AWS Resource Explorer | Search for and discover relevant resources across AWS |
| AWS WAF Bot and Fraud Control RuleGroup | Comprehensive security for web applications, APIs, and mobile apps |
| AWS Wickr | End-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration service |
| EMR Studio | EMR Studio is an IDE for data scientists and engineers to develop, visualize, and debug applications in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. |
| ISO 14001:2015 Environmental Management – Compliance Certificate | Standard for environmental management systems (EMS) |
| Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) | Managed OpenShift integration in the cloud |
Enhanced In-Console Editing Experience for AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda now offers an improved code editing experience in the AWS console based on the popular Code-OSS, Visual Studio Code Open Source code editor. This brings the familiar Visual Studio Code interface and many of its features directly into the Lambda console, allowing developers to use their preferred coding environment and tools in the cloud. The new Lambda Code Editor allows you to view and edit environment variables for your functions. The split-screen view simplifies test event configuration by allowing you to test your function and see your code and test results side-by-side. Directly in the new editor, developers can now use CloudWatch Logs Live Tail, an interactive log streaming and analytics capability that lets you view and analyze your Lambda function logs in real time. Additionally, the Amazon Q Developer AI assistant is integrated directly into the code editor, reducing the need to consult external documentation and streamlining your development workflow. These features are now available for all Lambda users, enhancing the overall development experience within the AWS console. For more details, check the “Introducing an enhanced in-console editing experience for AWS Lambda” blog article.
AWS Wickr: Serving Secure Communication Needs
AWS Wickr, a secure messaging and collaboration service is available in the AWS Europe/Zurich region. This addition enables organizations to establish encrypted communication networks within Switzerland, addressing data residency and compliance requirements. AWS Wickr provides end-to-end encrypted messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, and screen sharing. Importantly, messages can only be decrypted on end-user devices, ensuring the highest level of privacy. For enhanced transparency and trust, AWS has made the source code of the Wickr client and protocol publicly available. Administrators maintain full control over data, including information governance policies and ephemeral messaging options. With both cloud-native and self-hosted deployment options available, AWS Wickr offers flexibility to meet diverse organizational needs in the Zurich region.
Going forward
Based on customer demand, more services are in the pipeline and will be added over time. Customers can share their interest for local region delivery, request service roadmap information, or gain insight on service interdependency (under NDA) by contacting your AWS sales representative.