We expand AWS by picking a geographic area (which we call a Region) and then building multiple, isolated Availability Zones in that area. Each Availability Zone (AZ) has multiple Internet connections and power connections to multiple grids.

Today I am happy to announce that we are opening our 50th AWS Availability Zone, with the addition of a third AZ to the Europe (London) Region. This will give you additional flexibility to architect highly scalable, fault-tolerant applications that run across multiple AZs in the UK.

Since launching the Europe (London) Region, we have seen an ever-growing set of customers, particularly in the public sector and in regulated industries, use AWS for new and innovative applications. Here are a couple of examples, courtesy of my AWS colleagues in the UK:

Enterprise – Some of the UK’s most respected enterprises are using AWS to transform their businesses, including BBC, BT, Deloitte, and Travis Perkins. Travis Perkins is one of the largest suppliers of building materials in the UK and is implementing the biggest systems and business change in its history, including an all-in migration of its data centers to AWS.

Startups – Cross-border payments company Currencycloud has migrated its entire payments production, and demo platform to AWS resulting in a 30% saving on their infrastructure costs. Clearscore, with plans to disrupting the credit score industry, has also chosen to host their entire platform on AWS. UnderwriteMe is using the EU (London) Region to offer an underwriting platform to their customers as a managed service.

Public Sector -The Met Office chose AWS to support the Met Office Weather App, available for iPhone and Android phones. Since the Met Office Weather App went live in January 2016, it has attracted more than 4.5 million downloads. Using AWS, the Met Office has been able to increase agility, speed, and scalability while reducing costs. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is using the Europe (London) Region for services such as the Strategic Card Payments platform, which helps the agency achieve PCI DSS compliance.

The AWS Europe (London) Region has achieved Public Services Network (PSN) assurance, which provides UK Public Sector customers with an assured infrastructure on which to build UK Public Sector services. In conjunction with AWS’s Standardized Architecture for UK-OFFICIAL, PSN assurance enables UK Public Sector organizations to move their UK-OFFICIAL classified data to the Europe (London) Region in a controlled and risk-managed manner.

For a complete list of AWS Regions and Services, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page. As always, pricing for services in the Region can be found on the detail pages; visit our Cloud Products page to get started.

— Jeff;