Amazon Web Services has added a new U.S. region, this one in Ohio, designed to cut latency among customers in the eastern and central United States.
The new US East (Ohio) region contains three availability zones — AWS’s term for one or more data centers linked by a high-speed network but located in separate locations and engineered to be operationally independent of each other, with their own power, cooling and physical security.
AWS now offers a total of 16 availability zones within five U.S. regions in the U.S. Another four regions — in Canada, China, France and the UK — are slated to come online “within the coming months,” AWS said in a statement.
Having data centers located close-by cuts delays in getting data to and from both customers and end-users.
Public-cloud companies including AWS and Microsoft’s Azure compete partly on the number and location of their data centers, with each claiming to offer wider-spread availability, but comparing their actual geographic distribution is difficult because they all calculate and name their regions differently.
