eu-south-1: The next European AWS region?
AWS is expanding fast: Amazon already operates 16 regions and about 60 Edge datacenter locations worldwide. Industry analyst Gartner estimates AWS to be 10x bigger (measured in server capacity) than all competitors combined.
Looking at Europe
Amazon opened the first region back in 2008 — the Ireland region called eu-west-1. Germany Frankfurt (eu-central-1) has been open for business since 2014, the UK- London region just opened (december 2016) and Jeff Barr announced the Paris region to open in 2017.
In contrary to other public cloud providers a AWS region is not just a few racks or “a” datacenter. A AWS region consists of at least 2 availability zones, mostly 3, up to 5. Each availability zone has 2 or more datacenters with about 60.000 servers each. Amazon did this to allow customers to design for high availability and to limit the blast-radius. Watch this to learn more: AWS re:Invent 2016: Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton.
So what’s next?
All in all I am very curious what could be next. Amsterdam in the Netherlands would be cool; I would definitely like it. The main benefit of Amsterdam would be the AIX — the second biggest internet exchange. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels would probably like it as he is from Amsterdam, but is it likely? London and Frankfurt are very close to the Netherlands in terms of proximity and latency. Besides that the Netherlands is not a big country considering the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Looking at GDP and AWS presence
Looking at the GDP of countries — there seems to be a correlation between a countries economic size and Amazon AWS’ presence. The biggest economies already have one or more AWS regions, although Ireland would be an exception when just looking at GDP. Looking at the GDP of countries — Italy, Russia and Spain could be candidates for AWS expansion.
Betting on Italy
I think Italy is the most likely, especially the northern part of the country. This AWS region would be in close proximity of Austria and Switzerland — meaning those countries could benefit from low latency access. The economic area in the proximity of a AWS region in the north of Italy could service would be about 5% of the world-wide GDP, about the size of Germany.
So far I am just speculating, but there is another reason to expect something in Italy:
Amazon appears to be in negotiations with Italian utility company ENEL over the conversion of old power plants in the north and the south of Italy. Nobody knows for sure whether they want to convert the plants to a bookstore distribution center, an EDGE location of a real region with separate availability zones and several independent datacenters.
ENEL, Europe’s biggest utility in terms of capacity is shutting down old plants as part of a strategy to shift its focus to grids, renewable energy and retail. ENEL is also a public reference customer of AWS, they publicly claim to be “all-in” on AWS.
screenshot from ENEL customer case — presentation on Re:invent 2016
My bet is on an Italian AWS region in the north of Italy:
eu-south-1
So Italy is likely to be next after Paris. The GDP of Italy alone, the GDP of the surrouning countries and a deal with ENEL make it a very interesting next step for Amazon AWS.
Amazon won’t stop there!
What could be next after Italy? Russia with 2.5% of global GDP? I consider this unlikely, it would be complex for different reasons. On the other hand Russia could be likely for the same reasons Brazil was: protectionist regulations and policies forcing companies to produce and deliver products and services from within the country itself. But Brasil is obviously bigger looking at GDP, maybe Moscow on the longer term?
Madrid would seem much more likely to me: a AWS region in the capital of Spain could service all of the Iberian Peninsula and the south of France. Let’s call this region eu-south-2.
And then Stockholm (eu-north-1?) to service the Scandinavian countries and Baltic states?
Speculation? I know.
But there are several good reasons to believe Italy will be next after Paris: 1) the GDP of Italy alone, 2) the GDP and 3) low latency proximity of the surrouning countries and 4) a deal with ENEL make Italy very relevant and likely for Amazon to expand to.
ps: A funny #BREXIT note on the naming of the AWS Region in London: The UK voted to exit the EU, but Amazon named the London region EU-WEST-2
