AWS in Frankfurt, Germany

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the launch of its new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region, which is the 11th technology infrastructure region globally for AWS and the second region in the European Union (EU), joining the AWS EU (Ireland) region.

All customers can now leverage AWS to build their businesses and run applications on infrastructure located in Germany. As with every AWS region, customers can do this knowing that their content will stay within the region they choose. The AWS EU (Frankfurt) region comes as a result of the growth AWS has been experiencing and is available for any business, organization or software developer.

All AWS infrastructure regions around the world are designed, built, and regularly audited to meet rigorous compliance standards, including ISO 27001, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), PCI DSS Level 1, and many more, providing high levels of security for all AWS customers. AWS is compliant with all applicable EU data protection laws, and for customers that require it, AWS provides data processing agreements to help customers comply with EU data protection requirements.

More information on how customers using AWS can meet EU data protection requirements can be found on the AWS Data Protection web page. A of compliance certifications, and a whitepaper on how customers using AWS can meet BSI IT Grundschutz, can be found on the AWS compliance web page.

The new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region consists of two separate availability zones at launch. Availability zones refer to datacenters in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on HA can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance. For customers looking for inter-region redundancy, the new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region, in conjunction with the AWS EU (Ireland) region, gives them flexibility to architect across multiple AWS regions within the EU.

“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said Andy Jassy, SVP, AWS. “By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we’re enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth.“

Many German customers are already using AWS including Talanx AG, in the regulated insurance sector. Talanx is one of the top three largest insurers in Germany and one of the largest insurance companies in the world with over €28 billion in premium income in 2013.

“For Talanx, like many companies that hold sensitive customer data, data privacy is paramount,” says Achim Heidebrecht, head of group IT, Talanx. “Using AWS we are already seeing a 75% reduction in calculation time, and €8 million in annual savings, when running our Solvency II simulations while still complying with our very strict data policies. With the launch of the AWS region on German soil, we will now move even more of our sensitive and mission critical workloads to AWS.“

Hubert Burda Media is one of the largest media companies in Europe with over 400 brands and revenues in excess of $3.6 billion.

JP Schmetz, chief scientist, Hubert Burda Media, said: “Now that AWS is available in Germany it gives our subsidiaries the option to move certain assets to the cloud. We have long had policies preventing data to be hosted outside of German soil and this new German region gives us the option to use AWS more meaningfully.“

Academics in Germany were also quick to welcome the new region.

“The arrival of an Amazon Web Services Region in Germany marks an important occasion for the German business and technology community,” said Prof. Dr Helmut Krcmar, vice dean of the computer science faculty, and chair of information systems, Technical University of Munich. “We work with a number of DAX listed companies in Germany. Many have been holding off moving sensitive workloads to the cloud until they had computing and service facilities on German soil as this could help them comply with their internal processes. This new region from AWS answers this and we expect to see innovation amongst Germany, and Europe’s, companies flourish as a result.“

More than eight years of growth
For more than eight years AWS has changed the way organisations acquire technology infrastructure. AWS customers are not required to make any up-front financial or long-term commitment. They can turn capital expense into variable operating expense, scale by adding or shedding resources at any time, get to market much more quickly with new and critical ideas, and free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running backend infrastructure-all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security. This has led to many customers adopting the AWS platform in Europe and around the world.

The company has continued to focus on delivering cloud technologies to customers in an environmentally friendly way. The new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region enables customers to run on carbon-neutral power. This is AWS’ third carbon-neutral powered region.

The new region adds to AWS’ existing cloud computing investments in Europe. The AWS business is supported by teams of account managers, solutions architects, technical support engineers, and various other functions, helping customers in Germany, and across Europe use the cloud. Amazon also has development centers in Germany, Romania, and The Netherlands developing next generation technologies to support the AWS business.

Developers and businesses can access AWS from the new Frankfurt region beginning today, including Amazon Elastic Compute cloud (AmazonEC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Glacier, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Redshift, AWS OpsWorks, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, AWS CloudHSM, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Direct Connect, Amazon CloudSearch, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF), Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing. More details on each of these services and specific pricing for each is available here.

A number of ISV technologies are also available to customers from the new AWS EU Frankfurt region including: Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE, Trend Micro, Twilio, Acquia, Apigee, Bitnami, Esri, Infor, SAP, and Siemens. More details on running each of these technologies on AWS can be found here.

Customers and partners welcome new AWS region
Many thought leaders across Europe, including politicians, venture capitalists and academics, have long recognised cloud computing as a driver of business growth and are amongst the voices that are welcoming the new AWS region to Europe:

Brigitte Zypries (SPD), parliamentary secretary of state at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, said: “I am pleased about today’s announcement from Amazon Web Services to set up a cloud region in the State of Hesse. AWS’s considerable investment demonstrates that Germany is an appealing IT business location for foreign companies. The Federal Government has set the goal to establish the right conditions to make Germany the number one digital growth country. Our ‘Digital Agenda’ provides a comprehensive plan of how to make us grow in the field of the technologies of the future. In this context, the founding of data centers is an important contribution, as it further strengthens employment in the IT sector.“

“We welcome all investments in European cloud computing infrastructure. The increasing ability for cloud users to ensure that their data will stay in specific areas such as the EU is a sign of a maturing market,” said Neelie Kroes, VP, European Commission. “Cloud computing has the potential to be a huge source of growth and innovation for Europe and we are already witnessing it transform start-ups, enterprises and the public sector alike. Amazon’s investment in the Frankfurt region therefore is good news for our goal of making Europe a center of excellence for accelerated cloud computing adoption and usage. We look forward to seeing more such investments.“

“Cloud technologies have transformed the landscape for start-ups in Europe,” said Kevin Comolli from venture capital firm Accel Partners in London. “Entrepreneurs are no longer constrained by technology resources or their location, as cloud makes it possible for anyone with a great idea to build a global business quickly and reach millions of customers around the world. Many of our portfolio companies are great examples of this, and they run their businesses on the AWS Cloud. As entrepreneurs continue to unlock the benefits of the cloud, Amazon’s investment in a new region in Europe is a welcome development.“

Another VC to support the new region is Index Ventures. Saul Klein, partner, said: “Cloud has been key to driving innovation across Europe. At Index we’ve always believed that great companies can come from anywhere and by using cloud services like AWS our entrepreneurs, wherever they are based, can focus on building their businesses instead of data centres. We look forward to seeing more start-ups thrive as a result of the new Amazon region in Europe.“

Academics and research institutes have been amongst those that can see the potential the new AWS region has to accelerate innovation in Europe, amongst these are researchers at CERN. It is one of the world’s leading research institutes, is where the World Wide Web was born, and is also the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful and largest particle collider, which is being used to reproduce the conditions that existed within a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Dr. Sanjay Padhi, physicist, University of California, San Diego working at CERN, said of the launch: “With the evolution of the Large Hadron Collider, including a planned Future Circular Collider in Europe, the opening of this new region will provide tremendous opportunities for the scientific community at CERN to work with AWS.“

Amongst the German customers already building businesses and leveraging the flexibility and agility of the AWS cloud are start-ups such as 6Wunderkinder, EyeEm, mytaxi, Onefootball, Soundcloud, and Wooga, mid-market companies such as Airport Nuremburg, Euroforum, and Kärcher and Enterprise companies, Axel Springer, Hubert Burda Media, RTL, SAP, Software AG, and Talanx.

SAP AG is listed on the DAX, the German blue chip stock market index, making it one of Germany’s 30 largest companies.

“AWS has been a long-standing partner of SAP for many years,” said Martin Heisig, SVP of cloud and infrastructure delivery, SAP SE. “With the addition of a new region in Germany we clearly see the benefits for our customers and appreciate the investment by AWS.” Through the SAP cloud Appliance Library customers will now also be able to access SAP solutions in the AWS EU Frankfurt region.“

Another global, German-based organisation using the AWS cloud is Kärcher. With revenues of €2 billion Kärcher is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cleaning equipment.

“With the help of AWS, we are re-shaping the way our global IT is operating, in a more secure, reliable and compliant fashion than what we could have done on our own,” said prof. Matthias Mehrtens, VP, information systems, Kärcher. “We will use the new AWS Germany region to run our brand new Kärcher Fleet Management System that helps our customers to manage their cleaning-fleet in a smarter and more efficient way.“

Kempinski Hotels is another long time user of AWS that is welcoming the new Frankfurt region.

Alexander Gundlak, VP of IT, said: “Choosing the AWS cloud means that we don’t have to constantly think about hardware, and we can focus our resources on our core business, which is managing luxury hotels. The new AWS region in Frankfurt is great news and gives us another option to run our infrastructure in the EU with the assurance that our data won’t leave Europe.“

The German start-up community has also been using AWS since the services launched in 2006. One Berlin based start-up already using AWS and looking to use the new Frankfurt region is Onefootball. It is one of the world’s most popular football applications with 16 million downloads.

Lucas von Cranach, CEO, Onefootball, said: “With our application we supply football fans around the world with news, live scores, statistics, videos and exclusive live audio commentary. With any sports game latency is a critical factor. If fans even miss a second of their favourite team playing it can be devastating for them. The new AWS region in Germany is great news for us, and our users, as it gives us another region close to customers where they can enjoy the latest coverage from the English Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga or Ligue 1 without missing a second of the action.“

Berlin based start-up EyeEm is also using AWS to rapidly scale their business. EyeEm used AWS to launch a cross platform photo sharing application that allows users to take pictures, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services. The application has grown quickly since 2011 and now is downloaded over 50,000 times a day.

“Our global community of photographers expects fast and reliable delivery of their content around the world,” said Ramzi Rizk, founder, EyeEm. “The expectation of reliability played a decisive role in our decision to run our infrastructure on AWS. The new AWS region in Germany will give us increased flexibility and reduced latency, allowing us to innovate even further for our customers both in Germany and around the world.“

Another Berlin based start-up using AWS is social gaming company Wooga GmbH. For social gaming companies the ability to scale instantly to support millions of users is key to the success of their business.

“For Wooga, AWS was the best choice when it came to hosting two of our most popular games, Monster World and Jelly Splash, in the cloud. AWS gave us the ability to rapidly scale up and down, as well as to reach a global base of gamers,” said Jesper Richter-Reichhelm, head of engineering, Wooga. “We value the way AWS is always innovating for their customers and the addition of a German region is another example of why we view AWS as the strategic cloud partner with whom to grow our gaming business.“

Also from Berlin is 6Wunderkinder GmbH, the company behind Wunderlist.

Christian Reber, CEO and founder, Wunderlist, said: “What first attracted us to AWS was the fantastic technology stack combined with the low cost of entry and the ability to experiment often with very little risk. We have developed a style of deployment that would not be possible without AWS, allowing us to evolve our system easily many times per day instead of once per week or month. Using AWS has helped us to innovate faster and launch new products 100% faster than if we were to use our own infrastructure. Having a new AWS region in Germany allows us to cater our German customers even better and will foster innovation for the entire German start-up scene.“

Outside of Berlin there are other hotbeds of innovation starting to appear and many of the start-ups in these locations are using the cloud. One example is Hamburg based mytaxi.

“Being the world’s largest TaxiApp, mytaxi relies on AWS to help us service our global customer base in a real-time fashion,” said Niclaus Mewes, founder and CEO, mytaxi. “The addition of the AWS Frankfurt region will enable us to better serve our customers at home in Germany, with even more flexibility, speed and agility.“

In addition to a broad base of customers, AWS has a partner ecosystem in Germany, and around the world, that has built solutions and services on AWS. Among the many local ISVs are: SAP, Infopark, Suse, and Software AG.

Frank Schiewer, SVP global partner management, Software AG, said: “We have strategically chosen AWS as a cloud infrastructure provider for our Software as a Service portfolio. AWS provides the reliability, ease of use and time to value that enterprises demand in today’s rapidly changing digital economy. Therefore, we welcome this investment in Germany as it will further enhance the business flexibility and agility that Software AG can deliver to customers.“

European systems integrators already working with AWS in Germany include: Capgemini, Direct Gruppe, tecRacer and 7Principals.