Amazon Web Services has launched Local Zones in Chicago, Kansas City, and Minneapolis.

Local Zones act as Edge locations to host applications that require low latency to end-users or on-premises installations.

“Today we are announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Chicago, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. Customers can now use these new Local Zones to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or for on-premises installations in these three metro areas," the company said.

The company offers select services (compute, storage, database, etc.) within Local Zones close to population centers for latency-sensitive applications, usually where it 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.

First announced in 2019, Local Zones are now generally available in Boston, Denver, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia. The company has launched 11 zones this year, with six more due to launch in 2021 in Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle. The company hasn’t shared information about the facilities its Local Zone infrastructure sits within.

The company also operates Wavelength Zones, which provides compute and storage services that sit within telecom providers' 5G networks and provides access to cloud services running in a nearby AWS Region.

Verizon is AWS’ Wavelength partner in the US, providing Zones in 13 US cities; Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.

AWS has partnered with Vodafone to launch a Wavelength Zones in London, UK. The service is also available in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, through KDDI; and Daejeon, South Korea, through SK Telecom.