News from the AWS Summit in Berlin – 3rd AZ & Lightsail in Frankfurt and Another Polly Voice

We launched the AWS Region in Frankfurt in the fall of 2014 and opened the AWS Marketplace for the Region the next year.

Our customers in Germany come in all shapes and sizes: startups, mid-market, enterprise, and public sector. These customers have made great use of the new Region, building and running applications and businesses that serve Germany, Europe, and more. They rely on the broad collection of security features, certifications, and assurances provided by AWS to help protect and secure their customer data, in accord with internal and legal requirements and regulations. Our customers in Germany also take advantage of the sales, support, and architecture resources and expertise located in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich.

The AWS Summit in Berlin is taking place today and we made some important announcements from the stage. Here’s a summary:

• Third Availability Zone in Frankfurt
• Amazon Lightsail in Frankfurt
• New voice for Amazon Polly

Third Availability Zone in Frankfurt
We will be opening an additional Availability Zone (AZ) in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region in mid-2017 in response to the continued growth in the use of AWS. This brings us up to 43 Availability Zones within 16 geographic Regions around the world. We are also planning to open five Availability Zones in new AWS Regions in France and China later this year (see the AWS Global Infrastructure maps for more information).

AWS customers in Germany are already making plans to take advantage of the new AZ. For example:

Siemens expects to gain additional flexibility by mirroring their services across all of the AZs. It will also allow them to store all of their data in Germany.

Zalando will do the same, mirroring their services across all of the AZs and looking ahead to moving more applications to the cloud.

Amazon Lightsail in Frankfurt
Amazon Lightsail lets you launch a virtual machine preconfigured with SSD storage, DNS management, and a static IP address in a matter of minutes (read Amazon Lightsail – The Power of AWS, the Simplicity of a VPS to learn more).

Amazon Lightsail is now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region and you can start using it today. This allows you to use it to host applications that are required to store customer data or other sensitive information in Germany.

New Voice for Amazon Polly
Polly gives you high-quality, natural-sounding male and female speech in multiple languages. Today we are adding another German-speaking female voice to Polly, bringing the total number of voices to 48:

Like the German voice of Alexa, Vicki (the new voice) is fluent and natural. Vicki is able to fluently and intelligently pronounce the Anglicisms frequently used in German texts, including the fully inflected versions. To get started with Polly, open up the Polly Console or read the Polly Documentation.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about the continued growth and success of our customers in and around Germany!

— Jeff;