OVHcloud has launched a new Edge cloud service, starting with two locations in Spain and Belgium.
The company this week announced the opening of its first two public cloud ‘Local Zones’, with one site located in Madrid, Spain, and the other in Brussels, Belgium.
These local zones are suitable for workloads with latency-sensitive services such as real-time analytics, E-commerce websites, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for replay and streaming videos, as well as cloud gaming. Services include compute, block storage, and networking.
Originally announced last year, the French cloud and data center firm said the new launches were driven by technology from Gridscale – a converged infrastructure firm that OVHcloud acquired last year.
“The Group can now deploy cloud capacity within weeks to serve new international locations. The Local Zones in Belgium and Spain bring new options for customers to access the Group’s Public Cloud services, with low latency and local data residency,” the announcement said.
Throughout 2024, OVHcloud plans to open up to 15 Local Zones. The company hasn’t said what facilities the zones’ infrastructure will sit in.
Planned locations in Europe include Prague (Czech Republic), Marseille (France), Milan (Italy), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Zurich (Switzerland).
Local Zones are also expected to open in the US in Atlanta (Georgia), Denver (Colorado), Chicago (Illinois), Dallas (Texas), New York City, and San José (California).
Last year OVHcloud said it was aiming for 150 new Local Zones in the next three years.
“We are incredibly proud to announce today the opening of the first two OVHcloud Local Zones,” said Henrik Hasenkamp, CEO of Gridscale. “We’ve been able to integrate and deploy Gridscale’s technology just five months after joining the OVHcloud family, offering customers new options to consume OVHcloud public cloud, with added performance and data residency. This is just the beginning of an ambitious roadmap targeting a total of 150 Local Zones by 2026. We just can’t wait!”
The company has previously said it has more than 30 data centers in operation and under construction in France, Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, Poland, Singapore, India, and the UK. These are a mix of self-built and leased locations.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers its own Local Zone service, offering a limited number of services close to population centers for latency-sensitive applications, often in areas where the company doesn’t have an existing public cloud region.
AWS has 17 zones in 16 US metros, along with more than a dozen Local Zones in international markets across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and APAC. The company is currently undergoing a refresh, launching second-generation zones in existing markets with an expanded range of available services and compute instances. Despite multiple requests from DCD, AWS hasn't detailed what facilities the Local Zones sit within or what compute infrastructure they use.
