Blog | Amazon Announces the AWS Canada (Central) Region

Written by iTMethods | Dec 10, 2016 3:14:28 PM

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced earlier this year that they would be opening a new Region in Montréal, Quebec by early 2017. After much anticipation and excitement, it’s now here – and a month early!

Good News for AWS Customers in Canada

Amazon is committed to expanding its infrastructure to meet the needs of its international and diverse clientele. Plus, the new AWS Canada (Central) Region is carbon neutral, drawing its power from Quebec’s predominantly (99%) hydroelectrically-generated grid.

With AWS Canada (Central) Region, businesses can:

Control data residency. Businesses can take complete ownership over the Region that their data will be kept, simplifying compliance with federal or provincial regulations surrounding residency.
Facilitate high-availability deployments. Each Region contains multiple Availability Zones (AZs) and data centres, connected by private, low-latency fibre-optic networking to ensure rapid deployment for critical applications, harmonized data replication, and seamless failover. Having the new region in Canada makes it easier for Canadian businesses to take advantage of the speed and scalability of AWS.
Keep data securely stored in Canada. Unless you choose to architect your infrastructure differently, AWS will never transfer your data between Regions – even if a disaster occurs. If it needs to be replicated, AWS will instead duplicate it across AZs to keep it permanently in Canada.

With the AWS Canada (Central) Region, customers will be able to take advantage of elastic scalability and fulfill any Canadian data residency requirements to unlock the full power of the AWS Cloud.

AWS Global Infrastructure Comes to Canada

The AWS Canada (Central) Region offers two AZs. Each AZ is composed of one or more data centers, all housed in separate facilities and with redundant connectivity, power, and networking capabilities. Its Canadian infrastructure provides AWS customers in Canada (and the northern United States) with fast, low-latency access to AWS features– enabling real-time responses and improving stability, durability, and fault tolerance.

The new Canadian region is its first in Canada and fifth in North America. It complements US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), US East (Northern Virginia), and GovCloud (US). AWS’ global footprint now encompasses 15 Regions and 40 AZs, with three Regions and seven AZs planned for the next year.

The AWS Canada (Central) Region supports all sizes of D2, C4, M4, T2, and X1 instances and services including:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Elastic Load Balancing
Auto Scaling
Spot Instances
NAT Gateway
Dedicated Hosts

To see the full list of services the Canada (Central) Region will support, read the AWS blog.

The new AWS Canada Region represents a necessary opportunity for more Canadian businesses to take advantage of cloud computing and leverage all of AWS’s innovative offerings.

“We are thrilled that our Canadian customers can accelerate their digital transformation strategies with the new AWS Montreal Region,” iTMethods Founder and CEO said in a recent release. “Starting now, customers who want to adopt a DevOps culture and innovative automation techniques can securely and rapidly ReHost, RePlatform, ReFactor, and ReArchitect on AWS.”

About iTMethods

TMethods’ mission is to enable digital innovation on the AWS Cloud. iTMethods is an all-in AWS Advanced Consulting & Managed Services Provider offering a suite of Cloud Subscription and SaaS Offerings that help teams of all sizes execute their digital business & IT priorities.