Now Open—AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, Türkiye

We’re excited to announce the general availability of the AWS Local Zone in Istanbul, Türkiye. The new AWS Local Zone in Istanbul brings AWS compute, networking, and local storage capabilities to Türkiye, helping you securely store and process data in-country while reducing latency to end users.

In 2019, AWS launched the first Local Zone in Los Angeles, making Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types available with single-digit millisecond latency. Today, AWS Local Zones operate in 30+ metro areas globally, helping customers meet data residency requirements and run applications in more locations across the world. Now, the Istanbul Local Zone goes even further by bringing Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to help you store, process, and retrieve objects locally, and Amazon EBS Snapshots for fast, in-country backups and recovery—directly to Türkiye. This marks the first time Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Snapshots are available in AWS Local Zones in EMEA, opening up new possibilities for customers in Türkiye.

AWS infrastructure in Türkiye: building on our decade-long commitment

Since we opened our first office in Türkiye in 2015, we have been steadily expanding infrastructure in Türkiye to better serve Turkish customers:

In January 2024, AWS launched AWS Outposts in Türkiye, helping you extend AWS infrastructure and services to your on-premises or edge locations for a consistent hybrid experience.

In February 2024, AWS launched an Amazon CloudFront edge location in Istanbul, delivering up to 30% improvement in latency and performance for content delivery to Turkish users.

In May 2025, AWS opened an AWS Direct Connect location in Istanbul, helping you establish private, dedicated network connections between your on-premises infrastructure and AWS with dedicated 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps connections with MACsec encryption.

The launch of the Istanbul Local Zone builds on this foundation and strengthens our commitment to helping Turkish enterprises, startups, and government agencies innovate and scale.

Customers using the AWS Local Zone in Istanbul

Early adopters are already using the Istanbul Local Zone for real-time gaming, payment and digital banking, point-of-sale systems, stock exchange data transmission, human resource applications, customer communication tools, and more. Here are a few examples:

ForInvest, a financial technology provider for Türkiye’s leading banks and brokerage firms, uses the Istanbul Local Zone to process stock market data with low-latency, resilient connectivity to the Borsa Istanbul stock exchange. By leveraging the Istanbul Local Zone and on-premises infrastructure, ForInvest is building a hybrid cloud architecture powering next-generation financial technology systems aligned with Türkiye’s regulatory framework.

MigrosOne, the digital services platform for Migros and a leader in the digital transformation of the Turkish retail sector, uses the Istanbul Local Zone to support its extensive e-commerce brand portfolio and to innovate digital services. Running workloads on the Istanbul Local Zone helps MigrosOne maintain a strict data security posture, keep customer data in-country, and scale to meet shopping demand with a consistently available experience.

Riot Games, the game developer behind globally popular titles such as VALORANT and League of Legends, is deploying real-time multiplayer gaming workloads on the Istanbul Local Zone. Riot uses the Istanbul Local Zone to place game servers closer to Turkish players, reducing latency and improving gameplay experience, while scaling capacity dynamically to match player demand.

Available services

You can access a broad range of AWS services in the Istanbul Local Zone. Here’s what you can use today:

Compute – Launch Amazon EC2 instances for compute-intensive, general-purpose, memory-optimized, and distributed AI/ML inference workloads with support for On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, and Savings Plans.

Storage – Store, process, and retrieve data locally with Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 (One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class), keeping application data, media assets, backups, and analytics datasets within the country to meet regulatory requirements. You can create and manage backups locally with Amazon EBS Snapshots, giving you faster recovery times and a business continuity strategy that stays in-country.

Networking – Build isolated network environments with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and distribute traffic across instances with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB).

You can also use services that orchestrate or work with local services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Shield, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Application Migration Service, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS CloudFormation. The Istanbul Local Zone also provides a high-bandwidth, resilient, and secure connection to the Europe (Frankfurt) Region, so you can access the full range of services in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region through the same APIs and toolsets. the full range of services in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region through the same APIs and toolsets.

AWS partners in Türkiye

The AWS Partner Network (APN) in Türkiye includes consulting and technology partners — such as bestcloudfor.me, Commencis, Kloia, and LimonCloud — with deep technical expertise and local market knowledge to help you design, architect, build, migrate, and manage workloads on AWS. Here’s how AWS partners are helping customers today:

BestCloudfor.me, an AWS Premier Tier Partner, helps enterprises design and operate production-grade AWS environments with a platform engineering and AI-native operations approach. With the Istanbul Local Zone, BestCloudfor.me supports customers across insurance, energy, gaming, and aviation to improve application responsiveness and meet data residency requirements using AWS-native tooling and operational standards.

Commencis, an AWS Premier Tier Partner, accelerates AI-powered digital transformation for enterprises across engineering, cloud, AI, and design. With the Istanbul Local Zone, Commencis enables faster solution development and deployment, low-latency digital experiences, and greater control over data residency, helping businesses in manufacturing, retail, and financial services build secure and scalable solutions.

Kloia, an AWS Premier Tier Partner, accelerates enterprise Cloud and AI transformation with end-to-end support for application modernization, disaster recovery, and migration across financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, and automotive. With the Istanbul Local Zone, Kloia helps customers achieve low-latency performance and data residency compliance locally.

LimonCloud, an AWS Premier Tier Partner based in Türkiye, helps organizations modernize and operate critical workloads with deep expertise in cloud, DevOps, managed services, and business continuity. With the Istanbul Local Zone, LimonCloud enables customers in the energy, defense, manufacturing and healthcare sectors to run workloads closer to end users while addressing local data residency requirements.

Get started with the AWS Local Zone in Istanbul

To get started with the Istanbul Local Zone, opt in to the Istanbul Local Zone on AWS Global View, and create a Local Zone subnet on Amazon VPC console. That’s it! You’re all set! You can launch EC2 instances and create EBS volumes in Amazon EC2 console, store objects in Amazon S3 in Amazon S3 console, and use the other services in this Local Zone using the same APIs and tools. Refer to our User Guide and FAQs for more details about getting started with AWS Local Zones.

The Istanbul Local Zone integrates with your existing infrastructure including AWS Outposts deployments, AWS Direct Connect connections, and Amazon CloudFront distributions, and maintains connectivity to AWS services in the Region for flexible hybrid and multi-Region architectures.

For detailed pricing information on services available in the Istanbul Local Zone, visit the AWS Local Zones pricing page. To learn more about AWS Local Zones, visit the AWS Local Zones locations page.

Have questions or feedback? Leave a comment below — we’d love to hear how you’re using AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, Türkiye.

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