Amazon Web Services has opened a region in Canada, its first in that country.
The Canada (Central) region, located in Montreal, means local AWS customers and end-users will face less latency and fewer dropped packets than if applications were running in an AWS region elsewhere in North America. Keeping data in-country is also important to some companies and government agencies.
Canada joins Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Northern California, and AWS GovCloud as the sixth AWS region in North America and as the fifteenth worldwide, bringing the total number of AWS “availability zones” to 40 worldwide. Availability zones consist of one or more data centers that are isolated from each other but connected through low-latency links. Similarly, regions are completely isolated from one another.
The Canada (Central) region will offer multiple services, AWS said, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Relational Database Service (RDS). Quoting AWS Canada general Manager Eric Gales, IT World Canada reported that the region includes two availability zones and that Montreal was chosen as its location because of its abundance of renewable energy, especially hydropower.
Number-two public-cloud player Microsoft Azure has two regions in Canada, one in Toronto and one in Montreal. Number-three Google has no Canadian presence but operates three regions in the U.S.
