AWS News Blog
Amazon EC2 Crosses the Atlantic
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You can now launch Amazon EC2 instances in Europe!
We’ve created a new region for Europe, separate and distinct from the existing region in the United States.For fault tolerance, data separation, and stability, each EC2 region is an entity unto itself; issues within one region won’t affect the other one. This means that Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), security groups, and SSH keypairs must be created anew in each region. We’re working on tools to make it easy to move this information between regions. Also, as we learn more about how customers use multiple regions, we will add APIs to make it even easier for them to do so.
With the exception of support for Microsoft Windows and for Amazon DevPay (both of which will be ready before too long), every feature of EC2 is available in the new region, including Elastic Block Storage and Elastic IP Addresses.
The command line tools have been updated. The new ec2-describe-regions command lists all of the available regions, along with the endpoint URL needed to access them. A number of commands now accept the –region option. For example, this option allows ec2-run-instances to be used to launch instances in any available region.
The new region is now open for use by all interested developers. Pricing for EC2 instances, EBS storage, and I/O requests are slightly higher than in the US, reflecting differences in our operating costs in the regions.
Of course, we think that this new region will enable developers to do an even better job of serving their customers, giving them the ability to locate processing power in closer proximity to their user base while also helping them to meet EU data privacy requirements. In conjunction with the European version of S3, developers residing in or targeting markets in Europe now have powerful, local processing resources at hand.
Now that the dust has settled, I’ve got a few more related links:
- Amazon CTO Werner Vogels adds his take, Expanding the Cloud: Amazon EC2 in Europe. Werner has fielded many requests for a local instance of EC2 as part of his travel to Europe time and time again this past year.
- The Financial Times says that EC2 is no longer a mid-Atlantic kludge (whatever that means) and says that “Now comes the step that will finally turn this into a true European cloud: customers will be able to elect to have their data processed as well as stored and distributed in Europe.”
- Thorsten from RightScale talks about the reasons why we created separate clouds and reveals some of their thinking with regard to operating in such an environment.
- There’s a very helpful thread in the AWS EC2 Developer Forum.
— Jeff;