AWS Unveils New Dedicated Local Zones Service for Critical Workloads

Amazon AWS

Key takeaways:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of its new Dedicated Local Zones this week.
  • It’s a robust solution for handling sensitive data and critical workloads while adhering to regulatory and compliance requirements.
  • These zones boost efficiency by allowing multi-tenancy across AWS accounts, reducing operational burdens, and promoting collaborative cloud adoption.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently made waves with the announcement of a new service called Dedicated Local Zones. This new on-premises cloud offering is a strategic response to the evolving needs of organizations in the public sector and other industries with stringent regulatory and compliance needs.

AWS Dedicated Local Zones provide a cloud computing infrastructure that is completely managed by the cloud vendor. It operates in a customer-specified data center or location, and it’s exclusively used by the customer. The new service aims to cater to organizations that have sensitive data and applications that should run on physically separate infrastructure.

The new Dedicated Local Zones offer similar capabilities that are already available for Local Zones, including scalability, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go pricing. Moreover, the service provides several security and governance features such as controls to limit infrastructure access and data access monitoring and audit programs. It’s also possible to apply security clearance and other criteria on local AWS operating personnel.

“With Dedicated Local Zones, customers can use the multitenancy features of the cloud to efficiently enable adoption across multiple AWS accounts created by a customer’s community of agencies and business units, and reduce the operational overhead of managing on-premises infrastructure,” AWS explained.

What services can you access through AWS Dedicated Local Zones?

The new Dedicated Zones provide support for various AWS services, including Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), EC2, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Block Store (EBS), Direct Connect, and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Organizations can deploy multiple Dedicated Zones to operate consistent AWS infrastructure, tools, and APIs across different workloads.

The Singapore Government’s Smart Nation and Digital Government Group (SNDGG) is the first customer to launch a Dedicated Local Zone. The group is focused on improving public services, promoting innovation, and driving digital transformation across different sectors. If you’re interested, more details on how to configure Dedicated Local Zones are available on the official website.