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In the Works – AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Published Date
Author Jeff Barr

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will allow government agencies, regulated industries, and the independent software vendors (ISVs) that support them to store sensitive data and run critical workloads on AWS infrastructure that is operated and supported by AWS employees located in and residents of the European Union (EU). The first Region will be located in Germany.

Background
Late last year we announced the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge and made a commitment to offer you (and all AWS customers) the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud. Since that announcement we have taken several important steps forward in fulfillment of that pledge:

May 2023 – We announced that AWS Nitro System had been validated by an independent third-party to confirm that it contains no mechanism that allows anyone at AWS to access your data on AWS hosts. At the same time we announced that the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) External Key Store allows you to store keys outside of AWS and use them to encrypt data stored in AWS.

August 2023 – We announced AWS Dedicated Local Zones, infrastructure that is fully managed by AWS and built for exclusive use by a customer or community, and placed in a customer-specified location or data center.

AWS European Sovereign Cloud
The upcoming AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be separate from, and independent of, the eight existing AWS Regions already open in Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Spain, and Zurich. It will give you additional options for deployment, while providing AWS services, APIs, and tools that you are already familiar with. The design will help you meet your data residency, operational autonomy, and resiliency needs.

In order to maintain separation between this cloud and the existing AWS Global Cloud you will need to create a fresh AWS account. The metadata you create such as data labels, categories, permissions, and configurations will be stored within the EU. This does not apply to AWS account information such as spend and billing data, which will be aggregated and used to ensure that you get favorable pricing within any applicable volume usage tiers.

As I mentioned earlier, this cloud will be operated and supported by AWS employees located in and residents of the EU, with support available 24/7/365.

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be operationally independent of the other regions, with separate in-Region billing and usage metering systems.

Initial Region
The initial region will be located in Germany. It will launch with multiple Availability Zones, each in separate and distinct geographic locations, with enough distance between them to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting your business continuity. We will have additional details on the list of available services, instance types, and so forth as we get closer to the launch.

Over time, this and other regions in this cloud will also function as parent regions for AWS Outposts and Dedicated Local Zones. These options give you even more flexibility with regard to isolation and in-country data residency. If you would like to express your interest in Dedicated Local Zones in your country, please contact your AWS account manager.

Get Ready
You can start to build applications today in any of the existing regions and move them to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud when the region launches. You can also initiate conversations with your local regulatory authorities in order to better understand any issues that are specific to your particular location.

— Jeff;