AWS recently brought three additional Local Zones nodes online in the United States. The newest locations are Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City.

Data Center Dynamics reports that AWS has launched 11 edge locations this year, with six more due to launch in 2021 in Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle.

AWS states that Local Zones act as Edge locations to host applications that require low latency to end-users or on-premises installations.

DCD explains that the company "offers select services (compute, storage, database, etc.) within Local Zones close to population centers for latency-sensitive applications, usually where it doesn't have an existing data center footprint. Each Zone is a ‘child’ of a particular parent region, and is managed by the control plane in that region."