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Amazon Adds New US-East Region to the Cloud

For the last decade, Amazon Web Services has relied on US East Virginia as its primary east coast cloud region. Now at long last, Virginia is getting some company as Amazon announced on October 17 that is is finally opening a second US East Amazon Web Services (AWS) region. The new Ohio US-East Region joins […]

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Sean Michael Kerner

Oct 18, 2016

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For the last decade, Amazon Web Services has relied on US East Virginia as its primary east coast cloud region. Now at long last, Virginia is getting some company as Amazon announced on October 17 that is is finally opening a second US East Amazon Web Services (AWS) region.

The new Ohio US-East Region joins the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and US West (N. California) regions in the U.S, Amazon now has 14 infrastructure zones available globally.

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“Now with five highly scalable regions across the United States, AWS customers have multiple options for providing US-based end users low-latency access to cloud applications, as well as the opportunity to architect a variety of inter-region backup and disaster recovery operations for even greater availability,” Peter DeSantis, Vice President, Infrastructure at AWS said in a statement.

Amazon’s US-East location in Virginia has had its share of issues over the years. In 2013, the US-East Virginia region experienced 4 hours of degraded service due to a configuration flaw. In 2015, the Virginia region was hit again with service degradation that impacted popular online services including Reddit, Netflix, Tinder and AirBnB.

With each AWS Region, there is also the concept of an Availability Zone. US East (Ohio) is set to have three separate availability zones. Amazon explains in its release on the new Ohio region that Availability Zones refer to data centers in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones. Operational independence includes independent power, cooling, and physical security.

AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher reliability and fault tolerance. For customers looking for inter-region redundancy, the new AWS US East (Ohio) Region, in conjunction with the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and US West (N. California) Regions gives them flexibility to architect across multiple AWS Regions within the United States.

US East (Ohio) is set to benefit from clean power generated by a 100 megawatt (MW) wind farm located in Paulding County, Ohio. The Wind farm is set to formally begin supplying power to the US East Ohio AWS zone in May 2017.

“End-users based in the eastern and central US can leverage the Ohio Region to avoid up-front expenses, long-term commitments, and scaling challenges associated with maintaining and operating their own infrastructure,” Amazon wrote in a letter to AWS customers.

AWS continues to be a growing business for Amazon ten years after the first US-East Region in Virginia came online. For the second quarter of 2016, Amazon reported $2.9 billion in revenues from its cloud business.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist