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Cloud infrastructure giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to launch a data centre region in Paris, making it the fourth zone after the UK, Ireland and Germany.
It’s worth noting here that AWS’ UK plans are just that at the moment, with the company confirming at a recent event that the UK data centres were going ahead despite the Brexit referendum vote. Yet according to Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, writing in a blog post, the company’s expansion in France, as well as the growth in AWS in general, has led to this move.
“Over the past 10 years, we have seen tremendous growth at AWS,” Vogels wrote. “We have announced several additional regions in Canada, China, Ohio, and the United Kingdom all expected in the coming months. We don’t plan to slow down or stop there. We are actively working to open new regions in the locations our customers need them most.”
Among the customers AWS bundled into the press materials – the company named Schneider Electric, Lafarge, and Dassault Systemes as key customers in France – was Veolia Water France, which is aiming to adopt an industrial Internet of Things (IoT) project with the help of AWS. “By moving a large part of our IT system from our old IBM mainframe to AWS, we have adopted a cloud first strategy, boosting our power of innovation,” said Benito Diz, CIO of Veolia Water France. “We couldn’t have launched this industrial IoT project without the AWS flexibility.”
Earlier this month, AWS announced it had signed a criminal justice information services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Oregon, while plenty of other vendors are expanding their European operations. Microsoft recently launched its UK data centre with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on board as first customer, as well as expanding its German operations, while IBM and Interoute launched Norwegian and Swedish data centre zones respectively.
AWS was seen as a particular target by Oracle at its OpenWorld event in San Francisco, with the release of the software giant’s next generation data centres prompting CTO Larry Ellison to exclaim that Amazon’s lead was “over” in the IaaS space.
You can read Vogels’ blog in full here.
