The AWS Region in Sweden that I promised you last year is now open and you can start using it today! The official name is Europe (Stockholm) and the API name is eu-north-1. This is our fifth region in Europe, joining the existing regions in Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Paris). Together, these regions provide you with a total of 15 Availability Zones and allow you to architect applications that are resilient and fault tolerant. You now have yet another option to help you to serve your customers in the Nordics while keeping their data close to home.

Instances and Services

Applications running in this 3-AZ region can use C5, C5d, D2, I3, M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and T3 instances, and can use of a long list of AWS services including Amazon API Gateway, Application Auto Scaling, AWS Artifact, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), Amazon CloudFront, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Config Rules, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Dedicated Hosts, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry, Amazon ECS, Application Load Balancers (Classic, Network, and Application), Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Glacier, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS Organizations, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, AWS Resource Groups, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora, Amazon Route 53 (including Private DNS for VPCs), AWS Server Migration Service, AWS Shield Standard, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), AWS Step Functions, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Support API, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, VM Import, and AWS X-Ray.

Edge Locations and Latency

CloudFront edge locations are already operational in four cities adjacent to the new region:

Stockholm, Sweden (3 locations)

Copenhagen, Denmark

Helsinki, Finland

Oslo, Norway

AWS Direct Connect is also available in all of these locations.

The region also offers low-latency connections to other cities and AWS regions in area. Here are the latest numbers:

AWS Customers in the Nordics

Tens of thousands of our customers in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden already use AWS! Here’s a sampling:

Volvo Connected Solutions Group – AWS is their preferred cloud solution provider; allowing them to connect over 800,000 Volvo trucks, buses, construction equipment, and Penta engines. They make heavy use of microservices and will use the new region to deliver services with lower latency than ever before.

Fortum – Their one-megawatt Virtual Battery runs on top of AWS. The battery aggregates and controls usage of energy assets and allows Fortum to better balance energy usage across their grid. This results in lower energy costs and power bills, along with a reduced environmental impact.

Den Norske Bank – This financial services customer is using AWS to provide a modern banking experience for their customers. They can innovate and scale more rapidly, and have devoted an entire floor of their headquarters to AWS projects.

Finnish Rail – They are moving their website and travel applications to AWS in order to allow their developers to quickly experiment, build, test, and deliver personalized services for each of their customers.

And That Makes 20

With today’s launch, the AWS Cloud spans 60 Availability Zones within 20 geographic regions around the world. We are currently working on 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Bahrain, Cape Town, Hong Kong SAR, and Milan.

AWS services are GDPR ready and also include capabilities that are designed to support your own GDPR readiness efforts. To learn more, read the AWS Service Capabilities for GDPR and check out the AWS General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Center.

The Europe (Stockholm) Region is now open and you can start creating your AWS resources in it today!

— Jeff;