Amazon Web Services has announced the opening of the Frankfurt region, which is the second region in the European Union after Ireland. Two availability zones (AZs) are offered and Amazon reported that the Frankfurt region operates carbon-free, just as the US West (Oregon) and GovCloud regions do.

The Frankfurt region supports a large number of AWS services and a full listing of services available from all AWS regions is available in Amazon’s Products and Services by Region page. While on the Products and Services by Region page, one may notice that there are also 3 Frankfurt AWS Edge locations, of particular interest to AWS customers utilizing CloudFront or Route 53. While T2, M3, C3, R3, and I2 instance families are available in Frankfurt, HS1 (high storage density) and G2 (GPU intensive workloads) are not currently supported.

In addition to the security/privacy advantages of operating on German soil, which may calm the worries of some European customers looking to host their applications and/or data on AWS, improvements in network latency and higher reliability (through the increased number of regions/AZs within the EU) can be realized.

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