Amazon Web Services (AWS) has relaunched a Local Zone Edge location in Phoenix, Arizona.
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.
“Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new Local Zone in Phoenix, Arizona,” the company said last week. “This new AWS Local Zone comes with Amazon EC2C6i, M6i, R6i, and C6gn instances and Amazon EBS volume types gp2, gp3, io1, sc1, and st1. You can also access Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Application Load Balancer, AWS Direct Connect, and NAT Gateway in this new Local Zone to support a broad set of workloads at the Edge.”
First launched in 2019, AWS has rolled out 17 zones in 16 US metros. Local Zones are available in Atlanta, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles (x2), Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Portland, and Philadelphia.
AWS originally announced the general availability of a Local Zone in Phoenix in January 2022. That original Local Zone – known as us-west-2-phx-1a – has seemingly been replaced by the new us-west-2-phx-2a zone, with the original removed from the list of available locations.
“I am happy to announce that a new AWS Local Zone in Phoenix, Arizona is now open and ready for you to use, with more instance types, storage classes, and services than ever before,” Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, said in a blog post. “The original Phoenix Local Zone was launched in 2022 and remains available to customers who have already enabled it. The Zone that we are announcing today can be enabled by new and existing customers.”
DCD has reached out to AWS for more information.
After initially focusing in the US, at the turn of last year AWS announced plans to launch the service in 32 cities across 26 markets internationally. Some of the launched locations weren't on that original list, and the company has since said it had plans for hundreds of Edge locations in the future.
To date, AWS Local Zones are available in 17 metro areas outside of the US. AWS launched its first international Local Zones in Delhi, India, and Taipei, Taiwan in October 2022; and has since launched Zones across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and APAC.
Despite multiple requests from DCD, AWS hasn't detailed what facilities the Local Zones sit within or what compute infrastructure they use.
