AWS has partnered with Vodafone to expand its Wavelength Zones into three cities in Germany.
Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage services at the Edge of communications service providers’ 5G networks and provides access to cloud services running in a nearby AWS Region.
The company says Wavelength minimizes latency and network hops required to connect from a 5G device to an application hosted on AWS because application traffic can reach servers without leaving the mobile providers’ network.
In a short post announcing the news, Amazon said Wavelength Zones are now available in Berlin, Munich, and Dortmund.
“Today, we are announcing the general availability of AWS Wavelength on the Vodafone 4G/5G network in Germany. Developers, enterprises, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can now use the AWS Wavelength Zones in Germany to build ultra-low latency applications for mobile devices and users,” the company said.
AWS first announced it was partnering with Verizon for Wavelength Zones in December 2019, when a pilot project was launched in Chicago.
AWS now has four Wavelength Zones in Europe. In June of this year AWS partnered with Vodafone to launch the service in London, UK.
Verizon is AWS’ Wavelength partner in the US, providing Zones in 13 US cities; Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC. The service is also available in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, through KDDI; and Daejeon, South Korea, through SK Telecom.
As well as 5G Edge locations, AWS has launched a number of what it calls ‘Local Zones’ across the US, often in the same cities as its Wavelength locations. 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.
First announced in 2019, Local Zones are now generally available across 13 cities across the US with three more due to open before the end of the year. It recently announced plans to launch 30 more Local Zones across 20 countries – including Germany – globally. The company hasn’t said what facilities its Local Zone infrastructure sits within.
