Amazon Web Services Launches New, Low-Cost US West Region

Amazon Web Services is reinforcing its global cloud expansion with the immediate availability of the US West (Oregon) Region, which brings lower latency and better service to customers in the Pacific Northwest. But for customers on the west coast, there’s an added benefit — AWS services hosted from this new Oregon region cost about 10 percent less than those from US West (North California).

Before you throw Amazon any parades, keep this in mind: that 10 percent savings just brings parity with the US East region pricing. Regardless, it’s a potential boon for any organization or cloud service provider in the area that wants the edge of a local, ahem, edge location.

According to the official blog entry, the new location supports the lion’s share of Amazon Web Services offerings: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Auto Scaling, AWS CloudFormation, and Amazon CloudWatch.

Whew. Long list.

This is the ninth AWS region in existence. The last to launch, to my knowledge, was the Asia Pacific region – not counting AWS GovCloud, its dedicated data center for the federal government. I’m left wondering why Amazon would turn its focus back inwards on America after starting to build some momentum overseas.