This article is more than 1 year old

My name's Jeff B and I'm here to say: Canada's getting an AWS region around the way

I said, honey, it's a perfect place to stash data from the N-S-A

If you're looking for somewhere to run your computing instances outside the Land of the FreeTM, then Amazon Web Services has an option for the Americas with its first Canada cloud computing region.

Amazon claims the region has a minimum 9ms network latency to Toronto and New York, 14ms to Ottawa, and 60ms to Vancouver. The region supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related services, including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, NAT Gateway, Spot instances, and Dedicated Host.

"Today's launch brings our global footprint to 15 Regions and 40 Availability Zones, with seven more Availability Zones and three more Regions coming online through the next year," said Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS.

As part of AWS' commitment to try to use green energy, the company reports that its data centers in Canada are 99 per cent powered by locally sourced hydroelectric power. AWS is aiming to buy 50 per cent of its power from renewable sources by the end of next year.

Amazon's announcement means competition for Microsoft, which has two Canada regions (Central and East) for its Azure service. Google doesn't have a specific Canada region.

Having your data stored up in the frozen north may be a good job for local developers, and possibly those (like the Internet Archive) who are worried about surveillance in the US.

Bear in mind, however, that AWS is an American company, and as such is subject to National Security Letters and other spying orders to turn over data to the local government on demand. ®

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