Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new Local Zone in Houston, Texas.
"Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new AWS Local Zone in Houston, Texas. This new Local Zone supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C6i, M6i, R6i, and C6gn instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types gp2, gp3, io1, sc1, and st1," the company said this week. "You can also access Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Application Load Balancer, and AWS Direct Connect in this new Local Zone to support a broad set of workloads at the Edge."
Local Zones act as Edge locations to host applications that require low latency to end-users or on-premises installations. Each zone offers select services (compute, storage, database, etc.) close to population centers for latency-sensitive applications, often where Amazon doesn't have an existing data center footprint. Each Zone is a ‘child’ of a particular parent region and is managed by the control plane in that region.
Local Zones were first launched in 2019 and since then, AWS has rolled out 17 zones in 16 US metros. Local Zones are available in Atlanta, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles (x2), Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Portland, and Philadelphia.
AWS originally announced the general availability of a Local Zone in Houston in May 2021. That original Local Zone – known as us-east-1-iah-1 – has seemingly been replaced by the new us-east-1-iah-2a zone, with the original removed from the list of available locations.
The Houston location is the latest in a series of Local Zone refreshes expanding the range of services and instances available. Dallas, Chicago, and Phoenix have also seen second-generation Local Zone launches in recent months.
Beyond the US, AWS has also launched more than a dozen Local Zones in international markets across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and APAC.
Despite multiple requests from DCD, AWS hasn't detailed what facilities the Local Zones sit within or what compute infrastructure they use.
