AWS in Switzerland and Austria (Alps)
H1 2023 News About AWS Europe (Zurich) Region
The AWS Europe (Zurich) Region went live on November 9th 2022. The Region is located in the vicinity of Zurich and consists of three fully redundant Availability Zones (AZs). The AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance from other AZs, although they all are within 100 kilometers of each other to enable synchronous data mirroring.
The Region launched with 58 services, including redundant access to our global network (Amazon Direct Connect, which supports 100Gbit and line-speed layer 2 encryption through MAC Security (MACSec)) and a choice of instance types (virtual machines) that includes our own processor offering based on ARM technology (Graviton). The service offering at launch included fundamental services for networking and storage (e.g. Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes) as well as compute, including virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. Additionally, we launched a number of serverless and managed services in the area of databases, data warehousing, analytics, security, management, messaging, and more. Please refer to AWS Services by Region for a full list of available services by Region.
This blog post provides an overview of the region setup, services and features launches since opening, and helpful resources around service availability. Furthermore, we provide details on how to get started and enable the Europe/Zurich region in the AWS Management Console.
AWS has the concept of a Region that consists of a minimum of three, isolated, and physically separate AZs. Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency, and encrypted networks. Many services are built on top of multiple Availability Zones so that customers don’t have to figure out how to make them highly available. Check this whitepaper on fault isolation and static stability to learn how AWS helps customers achieve their resilience objectives.
Additional Services Since Launch
At present, the AWS Europe (Zurich) region provides a range of 112 services and offers a choice of 129 Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types. Notably, we’ve introduced the following services since its initial opening in November 2022.
| Service / Instance Type | Description |
| Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 | Multi-AZ and Global Database with automatic Scaling |
| Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager | Lifecycle management of snapshots and AMIs |
| Amazon EC2 C6g, M6g, M6gd and R6g instances | Instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors |
| Amazon EC2 High Memory instances | Running large in-memory databases (incl. SAP HANA) |
| Amazon EC2 X2idn instances | SAP certificed high-memory instances |
| Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Elastic File Storage (NFS) |
| Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) | Managed Kubernetes |
| Amazon FSx for Lustre | Managed Lustre Filesystem |
| Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP | Managed NetApp ONTAP Filesystem |
| Amazon FSx for Windows File Server | Managed Windows File Server |
| Amazon GuardDuty | Thread detection service |
| Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics | Analyzing streaming data (Apache Flink) |
| Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose | Ingests real-time streaming data |
| Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) | Managed Apache Kafka |
| Amazon MQ | Managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ |
| Amazon Route 53 Resolver | DNS Resolver including endpoints |
| Amazon SageMaker | Managed ML infrastructure, tools, and workflows |
| AWS AppConfig | Manage application configurations |
| AWS Application Migration Service | Moves and converts virtual servers |
| AWS AppSync | Managed GraphQL API layer |
| AWS Backup | Centralized backup |
| AWS Batch | Batch processing |
| AWS Chatbot | Operates AWS environment from within chat channels |
| AWS Cloud Control API | Standardized API to manage AWS resources |
| AWS Cloud Map | Cloud Resource Discovery Service |
| AWS CloudFormation StackSets | CloudFormation across multiple AWS accounts and Regions |
| AWS CloudHSM | Single-tenant Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) |
| AWS CodeBuild | Build and test code |
| AWS CodePipeline | Automate continuous delivery pipelines |
| AWS Console Mobile Application | Monitoring AWS resources on-the-go |
| AWS DataSync | Moves data between on-premises and AWS Storage services |
| AWS Directory Service Managed | Microsoft Active Directory and AD Connector |
| AWS Firewall Manager | Centrally configure and manage firewall rules |
| AWS Glue | Discovering, preparing, and integrating all data |
| AWS Lake Formation | Building and managing data lakes |
| AWS License Manager Linux Subscriptions | Manage commercial Linux subscriptions |
| AWS Private Certificate Authority | Highly available private certificate authority |
| AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) | Sharing AWS resources across multiple accounts |
| AWS Resource Groups | Organizing and managing AWS resources at scale |
| AWS Security Hub | Automate AWS security checks and centralize security alerts |
| AWS Service Catalog | Centrally manage curated Infrastructure of Code templates |
| AWS Shield Advanced | Managed application security service (Safeguarding from DDoS) |
| AWS Storage Gateway | Hybrid cloud storage services |
| AWS Transfer Family | Managed File Transfers (between S3, EFS, SFTP, FTP and AS2) |
| AWS Transit Gateway | Simplifying networking and peering relationships |
| AWS Trusted Advisor | Recommendations to follow AWS best practices |
| AWS WAF | Managed Web application firewall |
| EC2 Image Builder | Building and maintaining virtual machine and container Images |
| Amazon CloudWatch Observability Access Manager | Cross-account observability |
| Route53 Application Recovery Controller | Automate recovery for highly available applications |
| Saving Plans | Flexible Pricing Models |
| Amazon EventBridge Scheduler | Manage scheduled events and tasks |
| Service Quotas | View and manage your quotas for AWS services |
| AWS User Notifications | Centrally setup and view notifications from AWS services |
| Amazon Verified Permissions | Manage permissions and fine-grained authorization in applications |
Available Services and Resources
To find available services in specific Regions, you can consult the AWS Regional Services List, which is updated on a daily basis. Please follow the what’s new posts to learn about latest services and feature announcements.
Customers can also use the following commands in AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to check for available resources in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region.
List all Services:
List all VPC Endpoints:
List all EC2 Instance Types:
List all RDS Database Engines:
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.
How To Get Started?
To start using the AWS Region in Switzerland you must opt in by logging into the AWS Management Console and choosing the Region drop down to find the “manage region” section.
Optionally, you can also view and manage enabled and disabled opt-in AWS Regions on your AWS accounts using the AWS CLI and AWS Software Development Kit (SDK).
Enable or disable a Region for standalone accounts via CLI:
Enable or disable a Region in your organization
Have fun building!