Amazon EC2 Expands to Europe

Amazon (AMZN) announced last night that it had expanded its EC2 utility computing service, offering two availability zones in Europe. "This addresses the requests from many our European customers and from companies that want to run instances closer to European customers," Amazon CTO Werner Vogels wrote on his blog. "This is a very important milestone on the road to local access to all our services."

The new feature is significant because it can help site owners and developers to meet EU data privacy requirements, according to Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services. Amazon's S3 utility storage service already allows users to store data on servers in Europe.

See The Register, the Financial Times and TechCrunch for additional coverage.