Good news for Amazon FSx and Amazon EBS customers: AWS Local Zones

There were many announcements and feature launches at AWS re:Invent 2019. One of the announcements with forthcoming possibilities for AWS Storage users was on AWS Local Zones. For now, this news is especially pertinent to Amazon FSx and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) customers running high performance applications near Los Angeles.

As a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment, AWS Local Zones help you place select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists today. With Local Zones, you can easily run latency-sensitive portions of applications local to end-users and resources in a specific geography. This delivers single-digit millisecond latency for use cases such as media & entertainment content creation, real-time gaming, reservoir simulations, electronic design automation, and machine learning.

Each Local Zone is an extension of an AWS Region in which applications use AWS services like Amazon FSx or Amazon EBS. For example, a latency-sensitive application that uses Amazon FSx would now be able to leverage a high-bandwidth, secure connection between local workloads and those running in the proximate AWS Region. This would enable you to easily connect back to your other workloads running in AWS and to the full range of in-region services through the same APIs and tool sets.

As of right now, this new launch is available by invitation in Los Angeles, a Local Zone associated with US West (Oregon) Region, with more Local Zones coming soon. With media and entertainment workflows being a key use case, check out this this AWS Media Blog post by Lindy Anderson discussing some of the M&E launches at re:Invent, including AWS Local Zones.

For more information about this launch, go to the AWS Local Zones page. As always, comment on this post with any questions you may have about this launch, getting started, or AWS Storage in general. If we can’t help you, we know someone who can. Thanks for visiting the AWS Storage Blog!