AWS’s sovereign cloud adds 30 services in nine months

Nine months after launching its European sovereign cloud, AWS has expanded the service offering from about 90 to 120 services, according to Mustafa Isik, AWS’s Chief Technologist for Sovereignty. He told Swedish publication Techtidningen that the development is in line with expectations.

Isik highlighted German credit bureau Schufa as a customer. In May, Schufa confirmed plans to gradually move existing applications and services to the cloud. The company handles credit information on about 69 million individuals and 6.6 million businesses in Germany. AWS has more than 240 services overall, Isik said.

AWS says the sovereign cloud’s infrastructure is physically and logically separate from its other cloud environments. EU-based staff operate it and must be in the EU to work on it. Customer-created content and metadata, including roles, permissions and configurations, are to remain within the EU. AWS has also separated some functions used globally, including identity and access management.

Isik said customers choose between standard AWS regions, including Stockholm, and the sovereign cloud based on each system’s requirements. Some use both environments, considering their operational and governance differences sufficient for their own multicloud requirements.

On October 24, AWS tested operational independence by having its EU organization stop receiving software updates and certain operational information from the global organization for a few hours. The environment was then disconnected from AWS’s global backbone, while internet access continued through external providers. Isik said customer systems kept working without interruption during the test. He said operations would continue during isolation lasting several weeks or a month.