I am about to go on stage at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin where we will announce the ability for Amazon S3 customers to store their objects in Amazon’s European storage cloud. This has been a frequently requested feature by our European customers for various reasons, better latency control being the most important one. This is very important first step as it brings Amazon Web Services closer to the world-wide application development platform our customers want it to be. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done to make the services the absolutely best tools for international internet-scale application development, but the ability to control where you store your objects is an important first step.

Developers who want to make use of the European storage option can do so when they create a Bucket. A bucket is a named container in S3 within which a developer stores his/her objects. When you create a bucket you can now pass in <localconstraint> configuration that can be set to EU. This will create the bucket in Amazon’s European storage cloud and all objects that are stored in this bucket will automatically be stored on the Europe.