The AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates is now open. The official name is Middle East (UAE), and the API name is me-central-1. It allows users to deploy workloads and store data in the United Arab Emirates. The AWS Middle East (UAE) Region is the second Region in the Middle East, joining the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region.
With this launch, AWS now spans 87 Availability Zones within 27 geographic Regions around the world. AWS has also announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, and Switzerland.
The Middle East (UAE) Region has three Availability Zones that can be used to reliably spread applications across multiple data centers. Each Availability Zone is a fully isolated partition of AWS infrastructure that contains one or more data centers.
Availability Zones are in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to reduce the risk of a single event affecting the availability of the Region but near enough for business continuity for applications that require rapid failover and synchronous replication. This gives you the ability to operate production applications that are more highly available, more fault-tolerant, and more scalable than would be possible from a single data center.
The detailed list of the services offered in the new Middle East Region in the UAE is available on the AWS Regional Service List.
In addition to the two Regions—Bahrain and UAE—the Middle East has two AWS Direct Connect locations, allowing customers to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data centers and offices, as well as two Amazon CloudFront edge locations, one in Dubai and another in Fujairah. The UAE Region also offers low-latency connections to other AWS Regions in the area.