Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched its second AWS infrastructure region in Canada — the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region. Developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises — as well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations — will now have greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from AWS data centers located in Canada. Customers will also have access to advanced AWS technologies, including data analytics, security, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI), to drive innovation.
A new economic impact study reveals that AWS is planning to invest an estimated $17.9 billion in Canada through 2037 via the new AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region and the existing AWS Canada (Central) Region in Quebec.
“With the launch of the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region, customers and partners across Canada now have additional infrastructure to deploy applications with greater resilience, availability, and lower latency, while enabling more customers to innovate with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to help fuel economic development across the country,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS. “AWS is committed to helping organizations of all sizes and across all industries increase agility and drive innovation. We are proud to deepen our investment by driving local job creation, building cloud skills, and creating opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS Partners.”
“Our government is committed to positioning our domestic industries for long-term growth and sustainability. The powerful digital infrastructure being established by Amazon Web Services near Calgary, Alberta will support Canadian developers, startups, large enterprises and academic institutions in their work by enabling access to AWS’s powerful advanced cloud technologies,” said François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, Government of Canada. “This means faster and more reliable access to cloud services to support computing, storage, networking, analytics, artificial intelligence, mobile, hybrid, media, and security, which helps to secure well-paying jobs across many new industries.”
AWS has 105 Availability Zones across 33 geographic regions, with announced plans to launch 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Malaysia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region consists of three Availability Zones and joins the existing AWS Canada (Central) Region, which opened in December 2016. AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance.
Customers can now use the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region, in addition to the AWS Canada (Central) Region, for use cases such as disaster recovery and can run their mission-critical applications across multiple AWS Regions in Canada with even higher levels of resilience and availability. Customers also have access to advanced AWS technologies to accelerate innovation, including compute, storage, networking, business applications, developer tools, data analytics, security, ML, and AI.
Economic And Business Impact
The launch of the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region makes AWS the first major cloud services provider to have an infrastructure region in Western Canada. The development is estimated to support an average of more than 1,300 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs annually, and AWS plans to invest more than $2.9 billion in Alberta through 2037. These jobs, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and others within the country’s broader economy, will be part of the AWS supply chain in Canada. In addition, the construction and operation of the two AWS infrastructure Regions is estimated to generate more than $31 billion in gross domestic product (GDP), and the new AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region is estimated to add about $4.1 billion to Canada’s GDP through 2037.
Canadian technology services and digital media company Bell Canada is leveraging AWS capabilities to develop and scale innovative apps and to revolutionize how subscribers engage with its services and content.
“Bell’s purpose is to advance how Canadians connect with each other and the world,” said Petri Lyytikainen, VP of Enterprise Architecture, Cloud and Data Platforms at Bell Canada. “This collaboration reinforces our commitment to business resilience and fosters next-generation service innovations for both consumer and business customers across Canada.”
The National Hockey League (NHL) has been using AWS as its official cloud infrastructure provider to help analyze the details of the game for hockey fans, teams, and media partners. The NHL uses AWS artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more for its advanced analytic derivatives, NHL EdgeIQ powered by AWS.
“AWS is an industry leader in its portfolio of cloud services, helping to enable us to bring our fans closer to the game on the ice, while giving every team, official, and media partner advanced analysis of the game faster than ever before,” said Dave Lehanski, NHL executive vice president, Business Development and Innovation. “With the launch of a second AWS Region in Canada, this provides us more flexibility, reliability, and security to unlock more opportunities to engage our fans across Canada and the world to better understand and enjoy the game.”
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Canada’s largest biotech company, STEMCELL Technologies, relies on AWS to scale its operations, optimize costs, and increase the speed of innovation to better serve its life science customers.
“Technology is at the core of our company’s ongoing digital transformation and long-term growth,” said John Lilleyman, chief information officer at STEMCELL. “We moved to AWS in 2010 to help us focus our efforts on supporting science at a hyperscale level. As a result, teams spent less time on infrastructure and maintenance, and more time on innovating. The addition of this second AWS Region in Canada will help us to further improve the resilience of our critical workloads and help ensure we provide our employees, the majority of whom are based in Greater Vancouver, a low latency user experience.”
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