AWS plans Canada West investment in cloud infrastructure

Amazon Web Services, Inc (AWS) has announced an infrastructure region in Alberta, Canada. The move will provide customers with lower latency and greater resilience as more customers move to the cloud.

The new AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) at launch, planned for late 2023, which will add to the existing AWS Canada (Central) Region in Montreal made up of three AZs.

Globally, AWS has 81 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, with plans to launch 27 more. AWS also plans nine more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. 

AWS says it will create more than 5,000 new jobs in Canada with an estimated investment of more than US$17 billion (CA$21 billion) in the local economies by 2037. You can read the full details in the AWS Economic Impact Study.

“With another AWS Region in Canada, customers will see even lower latency for emerging solutions like 5G-enabled applications and machine learning at the edge, and it will strengthen their ability to architect their regional infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AWS. 

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney added the investment from AWS demonstrates that Alberta is establishing itself as a dominant player in digital technology and innovation.

What are AWS Regions and Availability Zones?

AWS Regions are made up of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct locations. 

These AZs are strategically positioned to cover a wide area but also close enough to provide low latency.

Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks. Customers who demand high availability can design applications to run in multiple AZs to achieve greater fault tolerance. 

AWS plans to invest over US$3 billion (CA$4 billion) by 2037 in the Canada West (Calgary) Region. 

Canadian organisations – including Air Canada, Canada Border Services Agency, D2L, Hootsuite, Keyera, Neo Financial, NHL, Nutrien, lululemon athletica, Provincial Health Services Authority, Sun Life, and Vancouver General Hospital – choose AWS to run their workloads.