Amazon announced they will be opening up a new AWS region in Stockholm, Sweden by 2018. This will be welcome news to the Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe. Amazon specifically cited Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway as the primary beneficiaries.
With the new region should come much better latencies for public cloud users in the area. I’m not sure if this will be a make or break move that will push enterprises in the area to really adopt AWS, there’s already an existing region based out of Frankfurt, with another to be opened in France within the year.
The main benefit is obviously increased redundancy of operation, something evidently still in need given the high profile cloud outages already this year. It should also allow government and financial institutions in Sweden to start to consider utilizing AWS, since they’ll be able to maintain records within the county. I won’t pretend to be an expert in Swedish privacy law, so I don’t know if this will have any privacy benefits to companies outside of the country.
I have to also think that with regions based out of both Ireland and the UK, that the reality of Brexit might have pushed Amazon to open another EU-based region a little sooner than anticipated. Just a guess on my part.
So where will AWS plant another region? 
Well based on their map, I’m thinking the continent without one might be a good place to start. I realize operating a major hyperscale data center out of Africa is not something you enter into on a whim, or just to fill out a map. But I don’t think one placed in burgeoning tech hubs like Kenya or South Africa is outside of the realm of possibility in the next few years.
