Amazon Web Services Cloud Computing Platform now available to customers from data centres in Germany

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS, Inc.), an Amazon.com company, has announced the launch of its new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region, which is the 11th technology infrastructure region globally for AWS and the second region in the European Union (EU), joining the AWS EU (Ireland) region. All customers can now leverage AWS to build their businesses and run applications on infrastructure located in Germany. As with every AWS region, customers can do this knowing that their content will stay within the region they choose. The newly launched AWS EU (Frankfurt) region comes as a result of the rapid growth AWS has been experiencing and is available now for any business, organization or software developer to sign up and get started at: http://aws.amazon.com.

All AWS infrastructure regions around the world are designed, built, and regularly audited to meet rigorous compliance standards including, ISO 27001, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), PCI DSS Level 1, and many more, providing high levels of security for all AWS customers. AWS is fully compliant with all applicable EU Data Protection laws, and for customers that require it, AWS provides data processing agreements to help customers comply with EU data protection requirements. More information on how customers using AWS can meet EU data protection requirements can be found on the AWS Data Protection webpage at: aws.amazon.com/de/data-protection. A full list of compliance certifications, and a whitepaper on how customers using AWS can meet BSI IT Grundschutz, can be found on the AWS compliance webpage at: http://aws.amazon.com/de/compliance/.

The new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region consists of two separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to datacenters in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance. For customers looking for inter-region redundancy, the new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region, in conjunction with the AWS EU (Ireland) region, gives them flexibility to architect across multiple AWS regions within the EU.

“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we’re enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth.”

Many German customers are already using AWS including Talanx, in the highly regulated insurance sector. Talanx is one of the top three largest insurers in Germany and one of the largest insurance companies in the world with over €28 billion in premium income in 2013. “For Talanx, like many companies that hold sensitive customer data, data privacy is paramount,” says Achim Heidebrecht, Head of Group IT, Talanx AG. “Using AWS we are already seeing a 75% reduction in calculation time, and €8 million in annual savings, when running our Solvency II simulations while still complying with our very strict data policies. With the launch of the AWS region on German soil, we will now move even more of our sensitive and mission critical workloads to AWS.”

Hubert Burda Media is one of the largest media companies in Europe with over 400 brands and revenues in excess of $3.6 billion. JP Schmetz, Chief Scientist of Hubert Burda Media said of the announcement, "Now that AWS is available in Germany it gives our subsidiaries the option to move certain assets to the cloud. We have long had policies preventing data to be hosted outside of German soil and this new German region gives us the option to use AWS more meaningfully."
Academics in Germany were also quick to welcome the new region, “The arrival of an Amazon Web Services Region in Germany marks an important occasion for the German business and technology community,” said Prof. Dr Helmut Krcmar, Vice Dean of the Computer Science Faculty, and Chair of Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich. “We work with a number of DAX listed companies in Germany. Many have been holding off moving sensitive workloads to the cloud until they had computing and service facilities on German soil as this could help them comply with their internal processes. This new region from AWS answers this and we expect to see innovation amongst Germany, and Europe’s, companies flourish as a result.”

More than eight years of growth
For more than eight years AWS has changed the way organisations acquire technology infrastructure. AWS customers are not required to make any up-front financial or long-term commitment. They can turn capital expense into variable operating expense, scale quickly and seamlessly by adding or shedding resources at any time, get to market much more quickly with new and critical ideas, and free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running backend infrastructure—all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security. This has led to many customers adopting the AWS platform in Europe and around the world.

As AWS has grown, the company has continued to focus on delivering cloud technologies to customers in an environmentally friendly way. The new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region enables customers to run on carbon-neutral power. This is AWS’ third carbon-neutral powered region.

The new region adds to AWS’ existing cloud computing investments in Europe. The AWS business is supported by teams of Account Managers, Solutions Architects, Technical Support Engineers, and various other functions, helping customers in Germany, and across Europe use the cloud. Amazon also has Development Centers in Germany, Romania, and The Netherlands developing next generation technologies to support the AWS business.

Developers and businesses can access AWS from the new Frankfurt region beginning today, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Glacier, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Redshift, AWS OpsWorks, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, AWS CloudHSM, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Direct Connect, Amazon CloudSearch, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing.

A number of ISV technologies are also available to customers today from the new AWS EU Frankfurt region including: Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE, Trend Micro, Twilio, Acquia, Apigee, Bitnami, Esri, Infor, SAP, and Siemens.