AWS Extends Cloud Reach In US By Opening Ohio Region

Amazon Web Services continues with its global cloud expansion

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened up a new region in Ohio East extending its scope in delivering cloud infrastructure services to the Eastern part of the Unites States.

The new region now supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and related services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, NAT Gateway, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Hosts. A whole host of AWS features that give the infrastructure-as-a-service offering its flexibility are also supported at the region.

The region also supports the use of virtual private clouds on top of AWS infrastructure.

AWS extends reach

cloudAWS already has a solid presence in the US, but the new region means it can better deliver cloud infrastructure to more companies and services in the East US.

With the region latency for a round trip of data sent from Ohio to the AWS exchange point JFK airport in New York is a mere 18 milliseconds, while it takes 68 milliseconds to send data to the US West Oregon AWS region and back to Ohio.

Overall the round-trip latency from the East to West coast of the US is 12 milliseconds, meaning the region gives US companies a faster way of using public cloud infrastructure to spread their services further afield without worrying about too much slowdown.

Given each AWS region contains one or more data centres and what it calls “availably zones”, each new region can significantly expand the reach of AWS. And while the company may be expanding its presence in the US, it is not shy in pushing its services into new countries across the globe.

“We are also getting ready to open up a second AWS Region in China, along with other new AWS Regions in Canada, France, and the UK,” Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS said.

AWS’ continuing expansion is more than a little indicative of how the online retailer has evolved massively to be much more of a technology company.

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