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A New AWS Local Zone Is Born in Athens, Greece!

AWS What's New ★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hi everyone, it's Shii! Today I've got news about a brand-new AWS location, so let's dive in!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, AWS has made a new Local Zone in Athens, Greece generally available. The Athens Local Zone is the second Local Zone in the EMEA region to support Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots. Its zone ID is eu-central-1-ath-1a, and its parent region is Europe (Frankfurt).

Here's what it supports:

  • Amazon EC2 (C7i, M7i, and R7i instances)
  • Amazon S3 (One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class)
  • Amazon EBS (Local Snapshots, and gp3 / gp2 / io1 / sc1 / st1 volume types)
  • Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS
  • Amazon VPC
  • AWS Direct Connect
  • Application Load Balancer

Why it matters

A Local Zone lets you get low-latency processing and local data storage close to a specific city, without needing a full AWS Region there. According to the original announcement, the Athens Local Zone is meant for use cases like:

  • Public sector services that need to meet strict data residency requirements
  • Financial applications that require in-country data processing
  • Real-time gaming and interactive experiences that benefit from single-digit millisecond latency

If you need to keep data or processing inside Greece, waiting for an entirely new AWS Region isn't realistic. A Local Zone lets you run resources physically close to Athens while still being backed by an existing parent region, which is exactly what these "keep it in-country" needs call for.

What changes

Once you enable the Athens Local Zone, you can run EC2, ECS, and EKS workloads close to Athens using the same APIs, tools, and security features as a regular AWS Region. Pricing is pay-as-you-go, including On-Demand, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances, with no minimum commitment.

That means public sector and financial teams in Greece with in-country data requirements can meet them using the AWS experience they already know, and teams building local games or interactive services can serve their users from somewhere much closer to them.

Dive Deep

Enabling it is simple: you can turn on eu-central-1-ath-1a from the "Regions and Zones" tab in AWS Global View, or through the EC2 ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API. No special request or approval seems to be required.

The Athens Local Zone is the newest addition to AWS's Local Zone network, which now spans more than 30 metro areas worldwide as part of AWS's Global Infrastructure. The supported instances are C7i, M7i, and R7i, today's general-purpose and compute-optimized generations.

Wrap-up

  • AWS has launched a new Local Zone in Athens, Greece (eu-central-1-ath-1a)
  • It supports EC2 (C7i/M7i/R7i), S3, EBS, ECS, EKS, VPC, Direct Connect, and ALB
  • It's aimed at public sector, financial, and gaming workloads that need data residency or ultra-low latency
  • Enable it via AWS Global View or the ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API; pricing is pay-as-you-go

If you're running a business in Greece with in-country data needs, or building low-latency services for users there, this one's worth a look!

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