Amazon Web Services has launched Local Zones in Dallas, Texas, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Local Zones act as Edge locations to host applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or on-premises installations.

The company offers select services (compute, storage, database etc) close to population centers for latency-sensitive applications, usually where it 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.

The service launched in Los Angeles in 2019, and added a second location in the city in 2020. The company now has seven Local Zones across the US; as well as the two in LA, AWS announced the general availability of Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami in May.

AWS says it plans to launch 10 more Local Zones later this year in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle.

DCD has reached out to Amazon for more information about how its Local Zones are hosted and in what actual buildings.