AWS plans to temporarily disconnect its European Sovereign Cloud from the company’s global network backbone on October 24, in an exercise designed to demonstrate that the environment can operate without infrastructure outside the European Union.
The exercise will run for several hours, during which the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will operate without a connection to the AWS Global Network. AWS said service availability within the sovereign cloud, other AWS Regions, and private connectivity through AWS Direct Connect will not be affected.
Customers could experience brief connectivity disruptions when traffic is moved to an alternative network route at the start and end of the test. AWS said these disruptions could occur while external networks update their routing information.
AWS tests operations without its global backbone
The AWS Global Network is the company’s private backbone for moving authorised operational data between AWS locations without using the public internet. Under normal operations, the European Sovereign Cloud uses this network for connectivity.
The exercise will not disconnect the European Sovereign Cloud from the internet. AWS will instead use dedicated internet connectivity supplied by European internet service providers, allowing workloads to remain reachable while the company’s private global backbone is unavailable.
AWS said traffic that would normally move across its private backbone will be rerouted over the public internet for the duration of the exercise. The company expects brief periods of routing convergence when traffic switches to the European ISP connections and again when it returns to the AWS Global Network.
AWS also uses a separate global system for limited transfers of operational data associated with the European Sovereign Cloud. The company said its EU-based team controls these transfers and that customer content and customer-created metadata are not included.
According to AWS, the system is also used for vetted source-code mirroring and software updates, while transferring a limited amount of approved operational information outside the EU. The company plans to disable the system entirely during the October exercise.
The Global Network backbone and operational-data transfer system are the two links to AWS’s wider global infrastructure that will be removed during the test. AWS said neither is critical to operating the European Sovereign Cloud, with the exercise intended to provide technical evidence for that claim.
The test will be conducted by the European Sovereign Cloud operations team, which AWS said consists entirely of EU residents working within the EU. The team will use hardware and software resources available within the sovereign cloud during the exercise.
AWS said it plans to share an update with customers and regulators after the test.
Data residency is only one layer of cloud sovereignty
Keeping data within the EU is only one part of the European Commission’s approach to cloud sovereignty. Its Cloud Sovereignty Framework assesses providers across eight categories, including legal and jurisdictional sovereignty, data and AI sovereignty, operational sovereignty, supply chains, technology, security and compliance, and strategic considerations.
The framework separates data location from operational control. Data sovereignty covers issues such as where data is stored and processed, while operational sovereignty includes whether EU-based operators can manage, maintain, and support a service without requiring non-EU vendor involvement.
AWS said customer content and customer-created metadata in the European Sovereign Cloud remain within the EU. The October exercise instead tests whether the environment can continue operating when its normal connections to AWS’s global systems are removed.
The European Commission also treats sovereignty as a graduated requirement rather than a single designation. Its Cloud Sovereignty Framework uses Sovereignty Effectiveness Assurance Levels, or SEALs, with SEAL-2 corresponding to data sovereignty, SEAL-3 covering technological autonomy and digital resilience, and SEAL-4 representing full sovereignty.
The framework applies 48 criteria across areas including legal jurisdiction, operations, supply chains, and underlying technology. These criteria allow data residency to be assessed separately from operational and technological dependencies.
AWS made the European Sovereign Cloud generally available in January 2026, with its first Region located in Brandenburg, Germany. AWS said the infrastructure is physically and logically separate from the company’s existing commercial AWS Regions.
The separation also extends to the cloud’s control plane. AWS said the European Sovereign Cloud operates as its own AWS partition, called aws-eusc, with separate identity and access management, billing, console, service endpoints, and organisational systems.
AWS partitions create boundaries between groups of Regions. Credentials used in AWS’s standard commercial partition cannot be used to access resources in aws-eusc, and services such as cross-partition role assumption, VPC peering, Transit Gateway peering, and S3 replication are not available across the boundary.
Customers therefore operate separate AWS organisations and billing systems inside the European Sovereign Cloud. AWS documentation states that cross-partition applications must integrate through network or API connections using separate credentials rather than shared AWS account trust.
The architecture also uses separate networking infrastructure for AWS Direct Connect. AWS said Direct Connect connections or gateways used in the commercial AWS partition cannot be extended directly into the European Sovereign Cloud, requiring separate connectivity into the aws-eusc environment.
AWS said day-to-day operations, including data-centre access, technical support, and customer service, are handled by personnel based in the EU.
The company has also placed a local copy of source code within the EU. AWS said the environment has no critical operational dependencies on infrastructure outside the region, a claim the October exercise is intended to test under live operating conditions.
EU rules separate operations from provider control
Operational independence does not cover every aspect of cloud sovereignty considered by European regulators. AWS remains headquartered in the United States, while the European Commission assesses legal and jurisdictional sovereignty separately from data location and day-to-day cloud operations.
The Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act makes that distinction explicit. Its first assurance level covers data processing and storage on infrastructure located in the EU, while higher levels add requirements around independence from third countries, EU ownership and control, personnel, and software supply chains.
The proposed structure separates where workloads run from who controls the provider and its supporting technology. AWS’s October test addresses the operational layer rather than provider ownership or all of the legal and supply-chain criteria covered by the EU frameworks.
The European Commission introduced its Cloud Sovereignty Framework as part of a €180 million procurement programme for cloud services used by EU institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies.
Providers in that procurement were assessed using both SEAL thresholds and the wider 48-criterion sovereignty framework, covering legal jurisdiction, data and AI, operations, supply chains, technology, security, and compliance.
The Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act would establish a single EU-wide framework for assessing cloud and AI sovereignty. It would also introduce common procurement requirements for public administrations and measures aimed at reducing dependencies in critical digital infrastructure.
AWS said the exercise was designed to align with the objectives of the European Commission’s Cloud Sovereignty Framework and the C3A framework from Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security, or BSI. The company expects the results to provide additional technical and operational evidence for customers and regulators assessing its sovereignty controls.
(Photo by Waldemar Brandt)
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