In April 2017, Amazon Web Services announced that it would launch a new AWS infrastructure region Region in Sweden. Today, I'm happy to announce that the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region, our 20th Region globally, is now generally available for use by customers.

The AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region is our fifth European Region, joining Dublin, Frankfurt, London, and Paris. With this launch, AWS now provides 60 Availability Zones, with another 12 zones and four Regions expected to come online by 2020 in Bahrain, Cape Town, Hong Kong, and Milan.

Starting today, developers, startups, and enterprises—as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations—can use the new AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region. They can run applications in Sweden, serve end users across the Nordics with lower latency, and leverage advanced technologies such as containers, serverless computing, and more.

The opening of the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region adds to our continued investments in Sweden and across the Nordics region, which also includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway. Over the last five years, we have expanded our physical presence in the Nordics, opening offices in Copenhagen, Espoo, Helsinki, and Stockholm. We launched Edge Network locations in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Today, we add to that presence with an infrastructure Region in Stockholm with three Availability Zones.

All across the Nordics, AWS technologies are fostering a culture of entrepreneurship and experimentation, helping to grow the next generation of Nordic enterprises. In 2013, AWS launched the AWS Activate program to provide Nordic startups access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts. We also provided web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support, third-party offers, and up to $100,000 in AWS service credits–all at no charge.

In 2018, we launched the first Pop-Up Loft in Stockholm, offering a co-working space and access to technology and business experts to support the growth of Nordic organizations. In addition, we are working with the venture capital community, startup accelerators, and incubators to help startups grow in the cloud. Across the Nordics, we work with Atomico, Creandum, EQT Ventures Nordic Makers, Northzone, and SUP46, in order to support the rapid growth of their portfolio companies.

Organizations across the Nordics are moving their mission-critical workloads to the AWS Cloud to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time-to-market, including enterprise customers like:

Aktia Bank, Ambita, Arriva, ASSA ABLOY, Bonnier, Basware, Cargotec, Den Norske Bank, F-Secure, Finnair, Fortum, Gelato, Husqvarna, Icelandair, IKEA, Modern Times Group, Nokia, Scania, Schibsted, SOK, Stockmann Oyj, Telenor Connexion, Telia, Tine SA, TopDanmark, Unibet, Visma, Volvo Group Connected Solutions, VR (Finnish Rail), WirelessCar, Wärtsilä, and XXL.

We are also enabling some of the Nordics' most successful startups and gaming companies, such as:

Bambora, Evolution Gaming, Hemnet, iZettle, KRY, LEO Innovation Lab, Lingit, Lunar Way, Mapillary, Mathem, Mojang, Paradox Interactive, Quinyx, Rovio, Supercell, Tidal, Trustpilot, Tink, and Vivino.

Public sector

Public sector customers, such as VR (Finnish Rail), the government-owned railway in Finland, rely on AWS to support their move from on-premises infrastructure. For VR, this is a journey that is already one-third complete and expected to be finished by the end of 2019.

"We are in the middle of the biggest transformation of our company," says Antti Kleemola, Chief Digital Officer of VR Group. "We are preparing for the opening of competition on rails in Finland and at the same time the industry is going through transformation to mobility as a service for both passengers and goods. Winning in this race requires that we become much more customer oriented, much more efficient in all of our operations, and at the same time shift our culture towards more lean and experimental. For this, the public cloud forms the basic backend for doing all of this and our choice for all of our own digital products and customer experience is AWS."

Hemnet

Hemnet is Sweden's largest real estate listings site with more than 2.8 million unique visitors and 26 million searches made every week. Ninety-one percent of all private properties on the real estate market are listed on Hemnet.

Hemnet started using AWS more than three years ago and has now moved all of their applications and services to AWS to innovate faster and save IT costs. With Auto Scaling, Hemnet has been able to cut costs by up to 50 percent for some of their instances. In addition, Hemnet's developers can now spin up temporary clones of Hemnet's entire application stack in just a few minutes. Shortening the feedback loop between the developer and the product owners leads ultimately to the faster development of new services.

WirelessCar

WirelessCar, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a provider of connected vehicle services. They support more than 3.3 million vehicles in more than 75 countries with services like car locator, engine remote start, driving journal, heater start, and stolen vehicle tracking.

They are using AWS to automatically scale up and down their connected car services on-demand, as well as to drastically reduce their time-to-market for new services. WirelessCar is also using a host of AWS security services to ensure that the data it collects for its customers is secure, and also that the services the company offers are reliable as well.

Supercell

Supercell is a mobile game developer, based in Helsinki, Finland, with over 100 million people playing their games every single day. They are responsible for some of the highest grossing mobile games in history, including Clash of Clans, Hay Day, Boom Beach, and Clash Royale.

They rely on the AWS Cloud for their entire infrastructure and use almost every AWS service available. We help Supercell to quickly develop, deploy, and scale their games to cope with varying numbers of gamers accessing the system throughout the course of the day.

Using the AWS Cloud, Supercell is able to reduce the risk and cost of failure in developing new games. They cancelled 14 games that they felt weren't good enough to take to market, and moved four others forward, some of which have become some of the highest grossing mobile gaming titles in history.

Vivino

Vivino has brought AI technology to the world of wine and is all-in on AWS. Using the app, users take a picture of the label of the wine they are drinking with their smartphone camera. The app then locates the wine, and provides user reviews, ratings, food matching recommendations, average pricing, and purchase options for every bottle.

Vivino was founded in 2010 and now has more than 20 million users worldwide and offices in four countries across three continents. Today, users have easy access to a library of 10 million wines and in turn, contribute 300,000 ratings on average every single day. Vivino also uses Auto Scaling to deal with the large seasonal fluctuations in traffic. During the winter holiday season, the use of the app increases by up to 300% and AWS allows them to seamlessly scale up to cope with the increase in traffic.

Telenor Connexion

Telenor Connexion is a part of one of the world's largest mobile telecommunications companies, Telenor. They started using AWS in 2014 after a decision to move away from outsourcing without having to build on-premises infrastructure, in an initiative to restart innovation in-house after a hiatus spanning several years.

Telenor Connexion is all-in on AWS. They are primarily using the services for two main platforms. The first platform is a real time, big data platform being used for analyzing traffic usage patterns to identify congestion and connectivity issues. The second platform is a managed IoT cloud with customer-facing applications and data management, which went live in 2016.

The partnership with AWS has enabled Telenor Connexion to change the way the company does business. After the move to the AWS Cloud, the company now has a way to develop and test solutions quickly and at a low cost. If the solution works as envisioned, Telenor Connexion can easily deploy it to production and scale as needed without an investment in hardware.

Summary

Our AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region is open for business now. We are excited to offer a comprehensive portfolio of services, from foundational technologies such as compute, storage, and networking to more advanced services such as containers and serverless computing. We look forward to continuing to broaden this portfolio with more services in the future.