Since its launch in March 2006 in the US Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), an online data-hosting service offered by US parent company, Amazon.com, has shown great uptake among web developers and businesses for web-scale computing due to its “storage service in the clouds”.
Due to developer demand in Europe for localised storage, the company launched a Europe-specific Amazon S3 yesterday.
It wanted the same high-quality, low-cost service, but with lower latency and local data storage. “We’ve been working hard to make this a reality and are excited to offer Amazon S3 from European data centres,” said Adam Selipsky, vice-president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services.
Currently payment is still accepted in dollars and there is no local language support for the various European countries, but Selipsky said this currently is being worked on.
Apart from offering companies the ability to store huge amounts of data on a pay-as-you-go basis, it also means that users will be automatically complying with European data protection laws.
“When we thought about the fact that this is the same service that Amazon uses in its own retail operations it made us confident to use it in our own,” said Klaas Waslander, chief technical officer for Albumprinter, a company that uses the service in both the US and Europe.
By Marie Boran
