Amazon opens new AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston, Miami

Amazon on Tuesday announced the general availability of new AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston and Miami. The cloud giant now has five Local Zones across four cities, with two based in Los Angeles. It plans to open 12 more later this year. 

Local Zones are a type of infrastructure that brings certain AWS services very close to a particular geographic area, industry or IT center. The idea is to better serve latency-sensitive applications. 

Some customers have been using AWS Local Zones for "distributed edge" use cases, geographically dispersing parts of their applications (such as gaming or voice assistant apps) in order to ensure low latency for customers in different parts of the country. Other customers are using Local Zones to bring cloud services closer to their existing branch offices or data centers. 

Each Local Zone is managed by a control plane in its "parent" region. The three new zones are all managed by the AWS US East region in Northern Virginia. 

The 12 Local Zones slated to open later this year will be in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Seattle. AWS plans to open more Local Zones after that, both in the US and elsewhere. It also plans on adding more services, including more EC2 types, to Local Zones.