Late last month I announced that we are working on an AWS Region in South Africa. Today I would like to let you know that we are also building an AWS Region in Italy and plan to open it up in early 2020.

Milan in 2020

The upcoming Europe (Milan) Region will have three Availability Zones and will be our sixth region in Europe, joining the existing regions in France, Germany, Ireland, the UK, and the new region in Sweden that is set to launch later this year. We currently have 57 Availability Zones in 19 geographic regions worldwide, and another 15 Availability Zones across five regions in the works for launch between now and the first half of 2020 (check out the AWS Global Infrastructure page for more info). Like all of our existing regions, this one is designed and built to meet the most rigorous compliance standards and to provide the highest level of security for AWS customers.

AWS in Italy

AWS customers in Italy have been using our existing regions for more than a decade. Hot startups, enterprises, and public sector organizations in Italy are all running their mission-critical applications on the AWS Cloud. Here’s a tasting menu to give you an idea of what’s already happening:

Ferrero is one of the world’s largest chocolate manufacturers (including the Pocket Coffee that powers my blogging). They have been using AWS since 2010, and use a template-driven model that lets them share features and functions across 250 web sites for 80 countries, giving them the ability to handle traffic surges while reducing costs by 30%.

Mediaset runs multiple broadcast networks and digital channels, as well as a pay-TV service, advertising agencies, and Italian film studio Medusa. The Mediaset Premium Online soccer service now attracts over 600,000 unique month visitors, doubling in size since it was launched last year. AWS allows them to meet this demand without adding more hardware, while also scaling up and down on an as-needed basis.

Eataly is the largest online marketplace for Italian food and wine products. After moving from physical stores to the web, they decided to use AWS to ensure scalability. Today, they use a wide range of AWS services, deliver 1.5 to 3 million page views daily, and handle holiday peaks ranging from 100 to 1000 orders per day.

Vodafone Italy has more than 30 million customers for their mobile services. They used AWS to power a new pay-as-you-go service to allow mobile customers to add credit to their accounts, building the service from scratch to be PCI DSS Level 1 compliant and to scale rapidly, all in just 3 months, and with a 30% reduction in capital expenses.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Centre for Earth Observation in Frascati, Italy runs the Data User Element (DUE) program. Although much of the work takes place in Earth-orbiting satellites, the program also takes advantage of EC2 and S3, storing up to 30 terabytes of images and observations at peak times and available to a 50,000 person user community.

The new region will give these customers (and many others) a new option with even lower latency for their local customers, and will also open the door to applications that must comply with strict data sovereignty requirements.

Investing in Italy’s Future

The upcoming Europe (Milan) Region is just one step along a long path! Back in 2012 we launched the first Point of Presence (PoP) in Milan and now use it to deliver Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF services to Italy, sharing the load with a PoP in Palermo that we launched in 2017. In 2016 we acquired Asti-based NICE Software (read Amazon Web Services to Acquire NICE).

We are also working to help prepare developers in Italy for the digital future, with programs like AWS Educate, AWS Academy, and AWS Activate. Dozens of universities and business schools across Italy are already participating in our educational programs, as are a plethora of startups and accelerators.

Stay Tuned

I’ll be sure to share additional news about this and other upcoming AWS regions as soon as I have it, so stay tuned!

— Jeff;