A New AWS Region Opens in Switzerland

Update December 8, 2022 – we have added AWS Organizations in the list of services.

I am pleased to announce today the opening of our 28th AWS Region: Europe (Zurich), also known by its API name: eu-central-2.

An AWS Region allows you to deploy your most demanding workloads and replicate your applications and data across distinct groups of data centers called Availability Zones. This new Region has three fully redundant Availability Zones located in the vicinity of Zurich. It offers your customers low-latency access to your applications while meeting your data residency requirements.

Regions and Availability Zones
AWS has the concept of a Region. Each Region is fully isolated from all other Regions. Within each Region, we have built Availability Zones. These Availability Zones are fully isolated partitions of our infrastructure that contain a cluster of data centers. Availability Zones are typically separated by multiple kilometers to mitigate the impact of disasters that could affect data centers. The distance between Availability Zones varies between Regions. The distance is large enough to avoid having data centers impacted by the same event at the same time but close enough to allow workloads with synchronous data replication. Availability Zones are linked by redundant, high-bandwidth, and low-latency network connections. Regions are linked by our custom-built, global, low-latency, private network with exabits per second of capacity in Europe.

Unlike other cloud providers, who often define a region as a single data center, the multiple Availability Zone design of every AWS Region offers advantages such as security, availability, performance, and scalability.

Instances and Services
The workloads deployed to this new Europe (Zurich) three-AZ Region can use C5, C5d, I3, I3en, M5, M5d, M6gd, R5, R5d, and T3 instances, and can use a long list of AWS services including Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppConfig, AWS Application Auto Scaling, Amazon Aurora, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Config, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), AWS Direct Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS),Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS Fargate,  Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon EMR, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Elastic Load Balancing, Elastic Load Balancing – Network (NLB), Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Simple Storage Service Glacier, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS Health Dashboard, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Aurora PostgreSQL, AWS Organizations, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, VM Import/Export, AWS VPN, and AWS X-Ray.

Continuous Investments in Switzerland
AWS has a long history of presence in Switzerland. We have worked with Swiss customers and partners since the launch of AWS 16 years ago. The first Swiss office was opened in Zurich in April 2016 to host the growing local team of technical and business professionals dedicated to supporting Swiss customers. In 2017, the AWS network was expanded into Switzerland with the launch of an Amazon CloudFront edge location and an AWS Direct Connect location. To support this growth, a second AWS office was opened in Geneva.

AWS plans to invest up to 5.9 billion Swiss francs (approximately $5.9 billion) in the Europe (Zurich) Region from 2022–2036 as we build, maintain, operate, and develop data centers to support the projected growth in demand for AWS technologies by our customers.

According to an AWS Economic Impact Study (EIS), this investment will contribute 16.3 billion Swiss francs (approximately $16.3 billion) to the GDP of Switzerland during the same period. This includes the value added by AWS services to the IT sector in Switzerland, as well as the direct, indirect, and induced effects of AWS purchases from the Swiss data center supply chain. The study estimates that this investment will support an average of 2,500 full-time jobs annually at external businesses in the Swiss data supply chain from 2022–2036.

Servicing our Swiss Customers
More than 10,000 Swiss customers use AWS services today. Organizations such as Fisch Asset Management, Helvetia, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich), Richemont, Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (RSI), Swiss Post, Swisscom, and Swisstopo, just to name a few, use AWS. Private and public sector organizations in Switzerland use AWS to accelerate their time to market, reduce costs associated with IT operations, and scale their businesses globally.

Global luxury group Richemont, owners of prestigious brands like Cartier, Montblanc, IWC Schaffhausen, and Van Cleef & Arpels, moved its entire enterprise IT infrastructure, including 120 SAP instances, to AWS. AWS, with its depth and breadth of services, enables Richemont to provide their customers with new digital experiences faster, including personalized storefronts and styling services, video chat consultations featuring fashion shows customized to the shoppers’ tastes, and tailored offers for early access to new items before they hit stores.

Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecoms company and one of its leading IT companies, is using AWS’s proven and broad infrastructure and cloud capabilities to power its 5G network, increase operational efficiency, and fuel innovation. Swisscom is pursuing a cloud-first strategy and will use AWS to increase IT agility, drive operational efficiencies, and accelerate time to market for new information and communications technology (ICT) features and services.

With AWS infrastructure, Swiss startups have been able to quickly scale their businesses and compete globally. Ava, a digital women’s health startup (acquired by FemTec Health) with offices in Zurich, San Francisco, Makati, and Belgrade, is all in on AWS. They created the Ava Fertility Tracker as a daily companion for women, which provides women with real-time, personalized information about fertility, pregnancy, and general health. The Ava bracelet is now sold in 36 countries worldwide and has been running on AWS since the first sales day.

Extending Reach through AWS Partner Network
Switzerland-based AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcomed the news of the launch of the Europe (Zurich) Region.

The APN includes tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of services for your cloud environments. We have more than 150 partners ready to help you in Switzerland, one third of them have their headquarters in the country.

Promoting a Diverse Community of Professionals
In December 2020, Amazon announced that it will help 29 million people around the world grow their technological skills with free cloud computing skills training by 2025. Switzerland is part of this global effort. Since 2019, AWS and our AWS training partner Digicomp have delivered training and certification programs to individual learners, customers, and AWS Partners to rapidly build cloud skills and close the skills gap.

Several universities in Switzerland have delivered AWS Academy courses as part of their curriculum, including FHNW (Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz), Fachhochschule Luzern, and Technische Berufsschule Zürich. To date, 32 Swiss institutions participated in the AWS Academy program, and 16 of them offered classes in 2022.

In March 2022, AWS launched AWS re/Start in Switzerland in collaboration with Powerhouse Lausanne, a training provider that promotes digital equality and diversity in Switzerland. A second cohort of AWS re/Start began in October 2022 in collaboration with the non profit Powercoders, which is focused on teaching IT skills specifically to refugees and helping them transition into the Swiss labor market.

Available Today With the launch of the Europe (Zurich) Region, AWS is further expanding its infrastructure offering, empowering you with the flexibility to run applications on the most secure and reliable cloud infrastructure while maintaining local data residency and providing the lowest possible latency for Swiss end-users. The new Region is available today on the AWS Management Console and for your API calls.

Go and deploy your workloads on eu-central-2 today!