Patrick AbotsiOne of the key marketing points for all major public cloud vendors is the geographical dispersion of their data centers, or regions, across the globe. Technically, regions are a group of data centers (or Availability Zones, in AWS lingo) within a specific geographical location. For the purpose of this article we will consider a region as a single location.
Canadian businesses and organizations looking to move their infrastructure to the cloud are concerned with where the physical data would be kept, for various reasons. I have tried to understand the Canadian presence of the three major cloud infrastructure providers and will be providing details below.
Amazon Web Services
AWS has announced the launch of its Canadian region in 2016, with the name is Canada (Central). Initially, this region was launched with two availability zones (as per AWS minimum requirements). In 2019, AWS announced that a third availability zone would be added in Montreal.
EC2, S3 and some of the most popular AWS services are available for that region.
Microsoft Azure
Azure boosts the largest number of regions of the three major cloud providers. In Canada, Azure maintains two separate regions: Canada Central and Canada East, in Toronto, Ontario and Quebec City, Quebec respectively. Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online, two other cloud services of the company, are also offered locally for Canadian customers out of these regions.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud has a single Canadian region which was launched in Montreal, in 2018. App Engine, Compute Engine, and all other major cloud services offered by Google are available in-country for Canadian customers through that location, which has three different availability zones.
Conclusion
Whether they plan to move to AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, Canadian businesses and organizations can be assured to have the option to host their websites, applications or databases locally, with reduced latency and in compliance with the PIPEDA and other regulations
