Amazon Web Services Announces Canadian Region

AWS will launch a cloud region in Canada in 2016, powered almost entirely by renewable hydro power

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced it will be opening a region in Canada. The cloud region will be located in Quebec, and is set to go live sometime this year.

Writing on the AWS blog, evangelist Jeff Barr said: “The planned Canada-Montreal region will give AWS partners and customers the ability to run their workloads and store their data in Canada.”

Read More: Why is there no AWS in Canada?

Carbon neutral

Barr said that the region, which will be powered by a cluster of data centres near Montreal, will be carbon-neutral and run almost entirely by “clean, renewable hydro power”.

awsUp until now, strict data sovereignty laws in Canada have forced companies who store sensitive information to keep it within the country, meaning that using AWS cloud storage infrastructure was out of the question.

But now, with this announcement, Canadian customers who want to keep their information within the country will be able to use Amazon’s whole cloud IaaS offering.

“As always, we are looking forward to serving new and existing Canadian customers and to working with partners in the area,” said Barr. “Of course, the new region will also be open to existing AWS customers who would like to process and store data in Canada.”

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