European cloud provider OVHcloud has launched a Local Zone Edge location in the Netherlands.
The company this week announced the opening of its first Public Cloud Local Zone in Amsterdam.
“Driven by innovative technology from gridscale, OVHcloud's latest acquisition, the group can now deploy cloud capacity within weeks to serve new international locations,” the company said. “Adding to Local Zones previously opened in Brussels, Madrid, and Milan, the new Local Zone in Amsterdam brings new options for Dutch customers to access the group's public cloud services, with reduced latency and local data residency.”
Local zones are suitable for workloads with latency-sensitive services such as real-time analytics, E-commerce websites, content delivery networks (CDN) for replay and streaming videos, as well as cloud gaming. Services include compute, block storage, and networking.
OVH said the zone was “in full compliance” with European digital sovereignty and security regulations, and fits stringent security policies of organizations such as finance, banking, and government sectors.
"Today's availability of the Amsterdam Local Zone, marks a milestone date in OVHcloud's relationship with the Netherlands, and demonstrates once again the centrality of the country in the group's strategy,” said Caroline Comet-Fraigneau, VP for France, Benelux, Africa, and Middle-East at OVHcloud. "From now on Dutch customers will take advantage of the Local Zone to rely on even more secure, fast, and efficient services to support business locally and digital transformation in the Amsterdam tech ecosystem."
Originally announced last year, the French cloud and data center firm said the new launches were driven by technology from Gridscale – a converged infrastructure firm that OVHcloud acquired last year.
The company launched the service in February with two locations; in Madrid, Spain, and, Brussels, Belgium, but didn’t officially announce the launch of the Milan zone at the time.
Throughout 2024, OVHcloud plans to open up to 15 Local Zones. The company hasn’t said what facilities the zones’ infrastructure will sit in. Planned locations in Europe include Prague (Czech Republic), Marseille (France), and Zurich (Switzerland). Last year OVHcloud said it was aiming for 150 new Local Zones in the next three years.
The company has previously said it has more than 30 data centers in operation and under construction in France, Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, Poland, Singapore, India, and the UK. These are a mix of self-built and leased locations.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers its own Local Zone service, offering a limited number of services close to population centers for latency-sensitive applications, often in areas where the company doesn’t have an existing public cloud region.
AWS has 18 zones in 17 US metros, along with more than a dozen Local Zones in international markets across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and APAC. The company is currently undergoing a refresh, launching second-generation zones in existing markets with an expanded range of available services and compute instances. Despite multiple requests from DCD, AWS hasn't detailed what facilities the Local Zones sit within or what compute infrastructure they use.
