Today, I am happy to announce our plans to open a new AWS Region in Spain in late 2022 or early 2023! I'm excited by the opportunities the availability of hyper scale infrastructure will bring to Spanish organizations of all sizes. When the AWS Europe (Spain) Region is launched, developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations will be able to run their applications and serve end users across the region from data centers located in Spain.
Currently, AWS provides 69 Availability Zones across 22 infrastructure regions worldwide, with announced plans for thirteen more Availability Zones and four more Regions in Indonesia, Italy, South Africa, and Spain in the next few years. The new AWS Europe (Spain)Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) at launch, and will be AWS's seventh region in Europe, joining existing regions in Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, and the upcoming Milan region launching in early 2020. AZs refer to data centers in separate distinct locations within a single Region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other AZs, with independent power, cooling, physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on running highly available applications can architect their applications to run in multiple AZs to achieve even higher fault-tolerance.
Today is another milestone for us in Spain. This Region adds to other investments we have been making, over the past years, to provide customers with advanced and secure cloud technologies.
There are places so remote, so harsh that humans can't safely explore them (for example, hundreds of miles below the earth, areas that experience extreme temperatures, or on other planets). These places might have important data that could help us better understand earth and its history, as well as life on other planets. But they usually have little to no internet connection, making the challenge of exploring environments inhospitable for humans seem even more impossible.
How do we push the boundaries of what's possible?
The answer to this question is actually on your phone, your smartwatch, and billions of other places on earth—it's the Internet of Things (IoT). Connected devices allow us to extend our senses to remote locations, such as a robot carrying out work on Mars or monitoring remote oil wells.
This is the exciting future for IoT, and it's closer than you think. Already, IoT is delivering deep and precise insights to improve virtually every aspect of our lives. Here's a few examples:
- IoT sensors in a factory can monitor and predict equipment failure before an accident.
- Healthcare providers can provide remote monitoring of patient health—improving patient care.
- Security cameras can better protect people with real-time notifications.
Because these IoT devices are powered by microprocessors or microcontrollers that have limited processing power and memory, they often rely heavily on AWS and the cloud for processing, analytics, storage, and machine learning. But as the number of IoT devices and use cases grow, people are finding that managing these connected devices presents new challenges. Sometimes an internet connection is weak or not available at all, as is often the case in remote locations. For some applications, a trip to the cloud and back isn't possible because of latency requirements (for example, an autonomous car interpreting its environment in real time).
There's also the cost to send data to the cloud to consider. Some sensors, like those in factories, are collecting an incredible amount of data and sending it all to the cloud could get expensive. These barriers are driving some people to the edge—literally.
In this post, I want to talk about edge computing, the power to have compute resources and decision-making capabilities in disparate locations, often with intermittent or no connectivity to the cloud. In other words, process the data closer to where it's created.
Innovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—"invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again"—even faster. The changes we made affected both how we built applications and how we organized our company.
Back then, we had only a small fraction of the number of customers that Amazon serves today. Still, we knew that if we wanted to expand the products and services we offered, we had to change the way we approached application architecture.
The giant, monolithic "bookstore" application and giant database that we used to power Amazon.com limited our speed and agility. Whenever we wanted to add a new feature or product for our customers, like video streaming, we had to edit and rewrite vast amounts of code on an application that we'd designed specifically for our first product—the bookstore. This was a long, unwieldy process requiring complicated coordination, and it limited our ability to innovate fast and at scale.
I'm happy to announce today that the new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region is now open! This is our first AWS Region in the Middle East and I'm excited by the opportunities the availability of hyper scale infrastructure will bring to organizations of all sizes. Starting today, developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations can run their applications and serve end users across the region from data centers located in the Middle East.
With this launch, our infrastructure now spans 69 Availability Zones across 22 geographic regions around the world. We have also announced plans for nine more Availability Zones in three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, and South Africa coming online in the next few years. The new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region offers three Availability Zones (AZs) at launch. AZs refer to data centers in separate distinct locations within a single Region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other AZs, with independent power, cooling, physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on running highly available applications can architect their applications to run in multiple AZs to achieve even higher fault-tolerance.
A few months ago, I wrote the post "Amazon Aurora ascendant: How we designed acloud-native relational database," and now I'm excited to share some news about the people behind the service. This week, the developers of Amazon Aurora have won the 2019 Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Systems Award. The award recognizes "an individual or set of individuals for the development of a software or hardware system whose technical contributions have had significant impact on the theory or practice of large-scale data management systems."
Customers often ask me how AWS maintains security at scale as we continue to grow so rapidly. They want to make sure that their data is secure in the AWS Cloud, and they want to understand how to better secure themselves as they grow.
Last year, I spent some time in Jakarta visiting HARA, an AWS customer. They've created a way to connect small farms in developing nations to banks and distributers of goods, like seeds, fertilizer, and tools. Traditionally, rural farms have been ignored by the financial world, because they don't normally have the information required to open an account or apply for credit. With HARA, this hard-to-obtain data on small farms is collected and authenticated, giving these farmers access to resources they've never had before.
A major component to the system that HARA created is blockchain. This is a technology used to build applications where multiple parties can interact through a peer-to-peer-network and record immutable transactions with no central trusted authority. HARA has had to develop additional technologies to make their application work on Ethereum, a popular, open source, blockchain framework.
Today, I am happy to introduce the new AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. AWS customers can now use this Region to serve their end users in Hong Kong SAR at a lower latency, and to comply with any data locality requirements.
The AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region is the eighth active AWS Region in Asia Pacific and mainland China along with Beijing, Mumbai, Ningxia, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. With this launch, AWS now spans 64 Availability Zones within 21 geographic regions around the world, and has announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Bahrain, Cape Town, Jakarta, and Milan.
Today, I am excited to announce our plans to open a new AWS Region in Indonesia! The new AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region will be composed of three Availability Zones, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run workloads and store data in Indonesia.
The AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region will be our ninth Region in Asia Pacific. It joins existing Regions in Beijing, Mumbai, Ningxia, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, as well as an upcoming Region in Hong Kong SAR. AWS customers are already using 61 Availability Zones across 20 infrastructure Regions worldwide. Today's announcement brings the total number of global Regions (operational and announced) up to 25.
At re:Invent 2018, AWS announced the AWS App Mesh public preview, a service mesh that allows you to easily monitor and control communications across applications. Today, I'm happy to announce that App Mesh is generally available for use by customers.
New architectural patterns
Many customers are modernizing their existing applications to become more agile and innovate faster. Architectural patterns like microservices enable teams to independently test services and continuously deliver changes to applications. This approach optimizes team productivity by allowing development teams to experiment and iterate faster. It also allows teams to rapidly scale how they build and run their applications.
As you build new services that all need to work together as an application, they need ways to connect, monitor, control, and debug the communication across the entire application. Examples of such capabilities include service discovery, application-level metrics and logs, traces to help debug traffic patterns, traffic shaping, and the ability to secure communication between services.
You often have to build communication management logic into SDKs and require it to be used by each development team. However, as an application grows and as the number of teams increase, providing these capabilities consistently across services becomes complex and time-consuming overhead.
Our goal is to automate and abstract the communications infrastructure that underpins every modern application, allowing teams to focus on building business logic and innovating faster.
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