Amazon extends EC2 cloud service to Europe

Amazon is bringing its EC2 service to the EU

Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services today announced it is extending its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service to Europe, a move that could give developers and firms lower latency.

The firm already runs its S3 storage service and CloudFront content delivery mechanism from datacentres in the European Union and says the extension of EC2 to the region will reduce the time required to obtain and boot new virtual server instances to minutes, enabling customers to scale up and down with ease.

Multiple Availability Zones, Elastic IP addresses, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) are all available in Europe now, with support for Windows Server and SQL Server coming soon, the firm said.

"In conjunction with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront in the EU, Amazon Web Services customers can now locate their storage, distribution, and compute in Europe, better allowing them to achieve low latency to their European customers and to meet EU data storage requirements when applicable,” said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2.

Standard charges for instances start at $0.11 per instance hour consumed.