Today, I am very happy to announce that, as we anticipated some time ago, a new AWS Region is available in Italy!

The Europe (Milan) Region is our sixth Region in Europe, and is composed of 3 availability zones (AZs) that you can use to reliably spread your applications across multiple data centers, for example configuring the subnets of your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud to use different AZs for your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Each AZ is a fully isolated partition of our infrastructure that contains one or more data centers.

AZs are located in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability in the Region, but near enough for business continuity applications that require rapid failover and synchronous replication. This gives you the ability to operate production applications that are more highly available, more fault tolerant, and more scalable than would be possible from a single data center. Fully managed services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB, replicate data and applications across AZs automatically.

The AWS Region in Milan offers low latency for customers seeking to serve end-users in Italy, and also has a latency advantage over other existing AWS regions when serving customers from other countries such as Austria, Greece, and Bulgaria. Results may differ based on the quality, capacity, and distance of the connection in the end user’s last-mile network.

An in-country infrastructure is also critical for Italian customers with data residency requirements and regulations, such as those operating in government, healthcare, and financial services.

AWS in Italy

Currently AWS has five edge locations in Italy (three in Milan, one in Palermo, and one in Rome) and an AWS Direct Connect location in Milan which connects to the Europe (Frankfurt) Region and to the new Region in Milan.

We opened the first AWS office in Italy at the beginning of 2014 in Milan, there is now also an office in Rome, engineering teams in Piedmont and Sardinia, and a broad network of partners. AWS continues to build in Italy teams of account managers, solutions architects, business developers, and professional services consultants to help customers of all sizes build or move their workloads in the cloud. In 2016, AWS acquired Italy-based NICE Software, a leading provider of software and services for high performance and technical computing.

I joined AWS in 2012, and I was immediately blown away by what Italian customers were building on AWS to lower their costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. For example:

GEDI Gruppo Editoriale is an Italian multimedia giant that publishes some of the largest circulation newspapers in Italy, including La Repubblica and La Stampa. In March 2018, during the Italian general elections, they experienced over 80 million page views and 18.8 million unique visits, and were able to provide their readers with continuous special election-day coverage with real-time data of election results.

is an Italian multimedia giant that publishes some of the largest circulation in Italy, including La Repubblica and La Stampa. In March 2018, during the Italian general elections, they experienced over 80 million page views and 18.8 million unique visits, and were able to provide their readers with continuous special election-day coverage with real-time data of election results. Satispay is disrupting the mobile payment landscape, allowing their users to securely send money or pay using a smartphone app that relies on International Bank Account Numbers (IBANs), and directly connects consumers and merchants via their bank accounts. They are all-in on AWS, and benefit from AWS’s compliance accreditations and certifications, many of which are required to operate in the financial services industry. Adopting DevOps and CI/CD best practices, they went from one deployment per week to 16 deployments per day , giving them the freedom and flexibility to develop new features, and innovate faster.

is disrupting the mobile payment landscape, allowing their users to securely send money or pay using a that relies on International Bank Account Numbers (IBANs), and directly connects consumers and merchants via their bank accounts. They are all-in on AWS, and benefit from AWS’s compliance accreditations and certifications, many of which are required to operate in the industry. Adopting DevOps and CI/CD best practices, they went from one deployment per week to , giving them the freedom and flexibility to develop new features, and innovate faster. Musixmatch is a Bologna-based startup that has quickly become the world’s largest lyrics platform , with more than 50 million users and over 14 million lyrics in 58 languages. Musixmatch is using AWS to be able to scale quickly, and most importantly to innovate constantly. In just three days, Musixmatch started using Amazon SageMaker to train models to analyze the language of songs and identify the mood and emotion of the lyrics. This allowed Musixmatch to build a platform where users can find new music based on emotions and mood of the lyrics of songs. Musixmatch also used SageMaker to train umBERTo, a state-of-the-art Italian language model .

is a Bologna-based startup that has quickly become the world’s largest platform , with more than 50 million users and over 14 million lyrics in 58 languages. Musixmatch is using AWS to be able to scale quickly, and most importantly to innovate constantly. In just three days, Musixmatch started using Amazon SageMaker to train models to analyze the language of songs and identify the and of the lyrics. This allowed Musixmatch to build a platform where users can find new music based on emotions and mood of the lyrics of songs. Musixmatch also used SageMaker to train umBERTo, a state-of-the-art Italian . Avio Aero is an aerospace business that designs, constructs, and maintains systems and components for military and civil aviation. Among other things, they developed a serverless application for their finance team to manage expense approvals and purchase orders. They are excited by the new Region because they have many applications that contain particularly critical data that needs to be stored in Italy.

Available Now

The new Europe (Milan) Region is ready to support your business. You can look at the Region Table for service availability.

With this launch, AWS now has 76 AZs within 24 geographic Regions around the world, with 3 new Regions coming in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. To build a secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for your applications, you can leverage the best practices we shared in the AWS Well Architected Framework, and review your architecture using the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

For more information on our global infrastructure, and the custom hardware we use, check out this interactive map.

— Danilo