Localized Cloud Services from AWS in Switzerland Are Now Available

It’s great news for anyone working in cloud computing - last week, AWS announced the opening of its 28th region in Zurich, Switzerland. Camptocamp has been using AWS S3 and EC2 services for many of our clients since they first launched in 2006, effectively revolutionising our industry. Now, with the introduction of data centers in Switzerland, our clients can enjoy the performance and scalability of the AWS cloud as well as the guarantee that comes with housing their data in the secure alpine nation.

Camptocamp’s experience using AWS in Switzerland

Already in early 2007, our infrastructure experts understood that this way of providing programmatically allocatable resources was not simply an evolution of existing practices, but a fundamental change. Our first tests with these services were very conclusive and we were very quickly enthusiastic about the idea of being able to obtain resources on demand and, above all, in a programmable way. We knew that nothing would ever be the same again. The cloud was born!

At the end of 2007, we seized the opportunity to use these services in a project for Swisstopo and SchweizMobil in a very short time, with a fixed release date and potentially very high load constraints. On the one hand, Swisstopo's on-prem infrastructure at the time did not allow for a review, and on the other hand, its capacities were increasing in such a short time that the choice to propose using the AWS cloud service became obvious. In the end, it was the right decision because the cloud was a real success.

Since then, our teams have multiplied the number of projects using these services and the "pay-as-you-go" principles that have become widespread. At the same time, this has helped us to impose our will to create and manage our infrastructures using the "Infrastructure as Code" principle rather than via manual processes that are not conducive to professional change management. Camptocamp's teams specialized in using open source tools like Terraform to take full advantage of the cloud by reducing the risk of error, optimizing costs and making our experts more efficient, faster and more agile. Swisstopo was our first major customer to mainstream the use of AWS services, and others have followed this new opportunity. In particular, we can mention QoQa, which was able to successfully consolidate its infrastructure in 2017 thanks to AWS services and Camptocamp's skills.

A bright future for AWS in Switzerland

As an expert in cloud computing and infrastructure-as-code for 15 years, Camptocamp has learned a lot and now manages infrastructures based on Amazon's AWS services, but also on other public cloud solutions such as Microsoft Azure, Exoscale, OVH or Scaleway, and also private clouds based on OpenStack. The question of location is very important when it comes to choosing a cloud solution. We are therefore very pleased that Amazon now has a new region in Switzerland. This announcement has been long awaited and we look forward to seeing new opportunities emerge as a result!

If your team has any cloud computing needs, please contact us and we will be happy to support your projects with our long experience as an AWS Global Partner, as well as the best practices in the market accumulated since 2007.