Amazon has launched a new Edge cloud location in Istanbul, Turkey (aka Türkiye).

“Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new AWS Local Zone in Istanbul, Türkiye,” the company announced this week, “bringing AWS infrastructure closer to end users, while enabling organizations to meet data residency requirements by storing and backing up data locally.”

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 also launched more than a dozen Local Zones in international markets across 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.

The majority of Türkiye's data centers are located around Istanbul, with a small secondary market in Ankara. Operators in the country include Equinix, Sparkle, TurkNet, and ComNet, among others.

None of the major US cloud providers currently have regions in Türkiye. Google is partnering with local telco Turkcell for a Turkish cloud region. Alibaba has previously outlined plans for a data center in the country.