In late 2019 I told you about the AWS Local Zone in Los Angeles, California. In that post I described Local Zones as a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that brings select AWS services very close to a particular geographic area. A year after that launch, I announced our plans to add 3 more Local Zones in 2020, and 12 more in 2021. Right now, we are working to bring Local Zones to 33 cities in 27 countries including 6 in Latin America.

Applications hosted in a Local Zone benefit from very low (single-digit millisecond) latency access to EC2 instances and other AWS services. Local Zones also give AWS customers additional choices regarding data residency, giving them the ability to store and process sensitive data (often financial or personal in nature) in-country.

Going Global
Today I am happy to announce the launch of Local Zones in Taipei (Taiwan) and Delhi (India). Like the existing Local Zones in the US, you start by enabling them in the AWS Management Console:

After you do this, you can launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, create Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes,and make use of other services including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). The new Local Zones include T3, C5, M5, R5, and G4dn instances in select sizes, along with General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volumes.

Local Zones in Action
AWS customers are working to put Local Zones to use. Here are a few use cases:

AdvaHealth Solutions – This digital health care & life sciences company supports radiology, oncology, ophthalmology and other medical imaging applications with AdvaPACS, a cloud-native image archive. The new Local Zones will allow them to deliver diagnostic image data with low latency in order to improve the point-of-care experience for patients and health care providers across Asia, and will also support expansion into new markets.

M2P Fintech specializes in building financial infrastructure and is an API infrastructure platform for Banking, Lending and Payments products. More than 600 Fintechs, 100 Banks & 100 Financial Institutions across MENA and APAC regions rely on M2P’s platform to power their own branded products including category leaders across ride-hailing, food delivery, and credit cards. M2P uses Local Zones instead of bearing the burden of setting up their own data centers and to meet local requirements for data processing and storage.

NaranjaX – This financial services company is the primary credit card issuer in Argentina. They are engaged in a digital transformation with the target of delivering an improved financial solution to their commercial customers, and believe that using Local Zones will give these customers a strategic advantage.

Pluto XR is the developer of the PlutoSphere OS that enables gamers, developers and operators to live stream XR applications to any XR device. In order to deliver a high quality streaming experience, they run their application as close to their end users as possible. The new Local Zones will allow them to serve millions of users in new metro areas

Riot Games is an American video game developer, publisher and entertainment company based in Los Angeles, California. Their games deliver an optimal player experience through ultra low latency for their MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) League of Legends and their first-person tactical shooter VALORANT. By deploying their games into Local Zones, Riot is able to serve players at low latency without the need for operating on-premises compute.

Zenga Media is one of the largest media-tech companies in India. They provide live streaming and over-the-top distribution of entertainment content to millions of users globally, while using cloud-based video editing and sharing to process content destined for TV shows, sports broadcasts, news, and movies. They will use Local Zones to provide local connectivity to their editors and customers, thereby speeding processing and delivering a superior video streaming experience to customers.

Local Zones Resources
Here are a few resources to help you learn more about designing, building, and using Local Zones:

I am always interested in hearing about how our customers are making use of Local Zones. Leave me a comment or track me down online and let me know what you are working on!

— Jeff;

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