AWS Launches London Region
Taking a look at the new offering & what it means for the UK & Europe
by Ethar Alali
After a long wait, the new AWS platform finally launched in the early hours of Wednesday morning. I received notice by email and although I’ve not managed to use it in earnest just yet, since it is still disabled in some part of the console, it’s clear AWS has positioned this very well, especially in light of the impending exit of the UK from the European Union.
The London cloud data centre has been in the works for a couple of years. Indeed, on a visit to AWS UK in London, me and a colleague were were privy to information surrounding the London Region back then. We were there for the new VPC add-ons and the preview release of EFS in mid-2015 and left with more information than we perhaps should have :)
London Region, What Have You?
AWS London, labelled eu-west-2 in the region sector, hosts pretty much most of the AWS infrastructure of elsewhere. It brings to our shores:
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS)
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Amazon EC2 Container Registry
- Amazon Elastic MapReduce
- Amazon Glacier
- Amazon Kinesis Streams
- Amazon Redshift
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
- Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Auto Scaling
- AWS Certificate Manager
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS CodeDeploy
- AWS Config
- AWS Database Migration Service
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- AWS Snowball
- AWS Snowmobile
- AWS Key Management Service
- AWS Marketplace
- AWS OpsWorks
- AWS Personal Health Dashboard
- AWS Storage Gateway
- AWS Support
- Elastic Load Balancing
- VM Import/Export
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon Route53
- AWS WAF
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- AWS Direct Connect
Price Positioning
The new region’s prices are definitely more expensive than Ireland or most things, but on par or less than Frankfurt, which positions it pretty well for the next couple of years and will provide good options for those UK companies looking to host and process data locally.
What’s Missing?
Not everything is available in London. Non-global AWS services will slowly migrate across to London over time. Yet, it still has a lot even out of the box. Looking at the EC2 instances, most of the general purpose setups are there.
The only notable difference being M3 EC2 instances, which use 1 or more “All-Flash” SSD storage systems instead of EBS. Most people will make the same use of M4 instances, despite the price difference.
A Shrewd Move by AWS?
After Brexit, London can continue to host data within the bounds of the UK, under whatever UK data jurisdiction rules it wishes which will provide competitors with a distinct advantage in data jurisdiction. Not least UK companies with domestic assignments, who will find themselves subject to some pretty significant regulatory changes, not once, but potentially twice due to leaving the EU potentially. Data jurisdiction under the combined regimen of the DPA, GDPR (including transition from the DPA), Investigatory Powers Act 2016 and then the subsequent legislative compliance upon Brexit, means businesses of any size based in the UK, are going to have a tumultuous few years catching up with all the legislative changes. Not just theirs, but also their clients’, who will need to have assurances about their data, especially in the reach of UK investigatory powers cross jurisdiction, into the EU.
As ICO registered data controllers, it’s definitely something we’ve had to look at. We have recently updated our internal policies to reflect these changes but also include scope for them to change between reviews. We review these policies annually whilst many other companies wait 2 to 3 years. We advise our clients to review them annually and make sure they are fit for purpose and our advice for other is the same. Get the advice of specialists in the field and consultants who understand both the data governance, jurisdiction and technological implications of the myriad of legislative changes on top of the impact of any Brexit severance of the UK legislative landscape from EU law
Companies will have to seriously consider how they even split companies themselves to maintain a distinct, clear and unambiguous separation between EU data jurisdiction and UK jurisdiction. It may be the case a non-UK holding company will have to be formed and the UK company separated out completely from the rest of EU operations. This would include assets in the cloud.
As ICO registered data controllers, it’s definitely something we’ve had to look at. We have recently updated our internal policies to reflect these changes but also include scope for them to change between reviews. We review these policies annually whilst many other companies wait 2 to 3 years. We advise our clients to review them annually and make sure they are fit for purpose and our advice for other is the same. Get the advice of specialists in the field and consultants who understand both the data governance, jurisdiction and technological implications of the myriad of legislative changes on top of the impact of any Brexit severance of the UK legislative landscape from EU law. — Ethar
Still…
AWS has positioned itself in such a way as to be able to take advantage of whatever happens regarding Brexit. It was one of those companies who’s cloud division is indifferent to the result. It is precisely their ability to move between regions that makes it what it is. When we leave, London has a data centre which, like Frankfurt, has 2 availability zones, separate from the EU. This is enough for most applications, but for those application requiring a third availability zone, then either EU transfer is required, or a second vendor is required. Hence, senior IT personnel, Enterprise Architects and CIO/CTO executives will have to think hard about how they want to host their data and run scenario analyses to verify they will work.
In any event, this is a boost to the UK tech scene, as much as it needed one.
E
Ethar writes about tech, data analysis, tech-social dynamics, diversity and pretty much anything else he likes. He also owns some company or other. Like this article? Don’t forget to hit the heart.
