Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new Local Zone Edge cloud location in Athens, Greece.

“Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new Local Zone in Athens, Greece,” the company said. “The Athens Local Zone is the second Local Zone in EMEA with support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Local Snapshots, enabling customers to store and process data within Greece to help meet local data residency requirements.”

Local Zones act as Edge locations to host applications that require low latency to end-users or on-premises installations. Each zone offers select services (compute, storage, database, etc.) close to population centers for latency-sensitive applications, often where Amazon doesn't have an existing data center footprint. Each Zone is a ‘child’ of a particular parent region and is managed by the control plane in that region - in this case, Frankfurt.

Local Zones were first launched in 2019 in the US. AWS has since launched more than 30 Local Zones in international markets across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and APAC.

AWS has previously told DCD that Local Zones can be hosted in third-party data centers, but can also be hosted in Amazon-owned facilities that are not part of a geographic cloud region.

This year has seen Amazon launch a Local Zone in Istanbul, Turkey, and Hanoi, Vietnam. The firm announced plans to launch the Athens location in June.

According to the company’s website, other Local Zones are planned in the Netherlands, Colombia, Belgium, South Africa, Portugal, Kenya, and Norway, though timelines haven’t been shared.