Now Open–AWS Region in Spain

The AWS Region in Aragón, Spain, is now open. The official name is Europe (Spain), and the API name is eu-south-2. You can start using it today to deploy workloads and store your data in Spain.

The AWS Europe (Spain) Region has three Availability Zones (AZ) that you can use to reliably spread your applications across multiple data centers. Each Availability Zone is a fully isolated partition of AWS infrastructure that contains one or more data centers.

Availability Zones are separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to reduce the risk of a single event affecting the availability of the Region but near enough for business continuity for applications that require rapid failover and synchronous replication. This gives you the ability to operate production applications that are more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center.

Instances and Services
Applications running in this three-AZ Region can use C5, C5d, C6g, M5, M5d, M6g, R5, R5d, R6g, I3, I3en, T3, and T4g instances, and can use a long list of AWS services including: Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora, AWS AppConfig, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Elastic Load Balancing–Network (NLB), Amazon EMR, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Fargate, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon S3 Glacier, Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), AWS Direct Connect, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS Health Dashboard, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS VPN, VM Import/Export, and AWS X-Ray.

AWS in Spain
The new AWS Europe (Spain) Region is a natural progression for AWS to support the tens of thousands of customers on the Iberian Peninsula. The Region will support our customers’ most mission-critical workloads by providing lower latency to end users across Iberia and meeting data residency needs (now customers can store their data in Spain).

In addition to the new Region in Spain, AWS currently has four Amazon CloudFront edge locations available in Madrid, Spain. And since 2016, customers can benefit from AWS Direct Connect locations to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data centers and offices. The Region in Spain also offers low-latency connections to other AWS Regions in the area, as shown in the following chart:

AWS also has had offices in Madrid since 2014 and in Barcelona since 2018 and has a broad network of local partners. In addition to expanding infrastructure, AWS continues to make investments in education initiatives, training, and start-up enablement to support Spain’s digital transformation and economic development plans.

• AWS Activate – Since 2013, this program has given Spanish start-ups access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts, along with web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support, offers from third parties, and up to $100,000 in credits to use AWS services.
• AWS Educate and AWS Academy – AWS has trained over one hundred thousand individuals in Spain in cloud skills since 2017. These programs provide higher-education institutions, educators, and students with cloud computing courses and certifications. AWS Academy has delivered courses for institutions such as ESADE, IE, UNIR, and others.
• AWS re/Start – AWS re/Start is a skills development and job training program that aims to build local talent by providing AWS Cloud skills development and job opportunities at no cost to learners who are unemployed or are members of under-represented communities in Spain. In November 2020, AWS launched this program in Spain in collaboration with Cámara de Comercio de Madrid and in 2021 in collaboration with Universidad of Granada.
• AWS GetIT – AWS knows that having a diverse workforce gives organizations a better understanding of customers’ needs and is key to unlocking ideas and speeding up innovation. AWS supports many programs focused on diversity and launched AWS GetIT in Spain across 11 schools to introduce young students (ESO—Educación Secundaria Obligatoria—students) to cloud computing and inspire them to consider a career in technology.

Sustainability is also very important for AWS. In 2019, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040—10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. That is why in Spain, Amazon and AWS currently have two operational renewable energy projects delivering clean energy into the Spanish grid to support the AWS Europe (Spain) Region and Amazon’s logistics network in the country.

Amazon and AWS have announced 14 more projects, currently in development, that will come online from 2022 to 2024. The 16 projects in Spain will add 1.5 gigawatts of renewable energy to the Spanish grid. This is enough to power over 850,000 average Spanish homes. Learn more about AWS sustainability in Spain.

AWS Customers in Spain
We have many amazing customers in Spain that are doing incredible things with AWS, for example:

LactApp is a Spanish start-up that was created out of the vision that every mother should have a breastfeeding and motherhood expert in their pocket. LactApp uses AWS services to build their video-on-demand capability that allows experts to upload their content and process the videos, and they make it available for their over 4,000 end users automatically.

Glovo is one of the biggest companies in the food delivery industry, born in Barcelona, Spain. The Glovo app is available in 25 countries with over 150,000 restaurants. Glovo receives over 2 TB of data daily from all the usage of their customers. Using AWS, Glovo built a data lake that allows them to store data securely and access it when they need it.

Madrid-based Savana helps healthcare providers unlock the value of their electronic medical records (EMRs) for research. They operate one of the largest artificial intelligence–enabled, multicentric research networks in the world, with over 180 hospitals across 15 countries. They use AWS to process billions of EMRs and data points to run machine learning algorithms to investigate disease prediction and treatment.

Available Now
The new Region in Spain is ready to support your business. You can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Regional Service List.

With this launch, AWS now spans 93 Availability Zones within 29 geographic Regions around the world. We have also announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand.

For more information on our global infrastructure, upcoming Regions, and the custom hardware we use, visit the Global Infrastructure page.

— Marcia