Less than two months after Amazon.com Inc. chief technology officer Werner Vogels revealed plans to bring its public cloud into Canada, the expansion has become official.

The company on Wednesday launched a new data center cluster in Montreal that consists of two separate campuses located a safe distance apart. As Amazon detailed in its announcement, the idea is to minimize the risk of a localized event such as a power outage knocking both sites offline and thus causing a nation-wide service interruption. It’s the same model that the provider has taken with its other cloud facilities down in the U.S. and elsewhere.

At the same time, there is often a great deal of variety between Amazon data centers that is influenced by factors such as the local weather and power availability. The company boasts that the two new Montreal campuses, which it refers to as Availability Zones, run on an electricity grid that is supported almost entirely by hydropower. Amazon has committed to switch half of its global infrastructure to sustainable energy sources by the end of 2017.

In the more immediate future, the new data center cluster will let its tens of thousands of Canadian companies to keep their applications closer to home. Local customers previously had to run their workloads in Amazon’s U.S. facilities and wait for every request to travel across the border.

The improved access speeds that this week’s expansion will enable should help the provider better court companies with latency-sensitive workloads such as analytics applications. Plus, Amazon is now also in a better position to target the Canadian financial sector and other regulated industries where firms are prohibited from moving certain data to foreign jurisdictions. The National Bank of Canada, British Columbia Hydro and International Civil Aviation Organization are three of the customers that stand to benefit on this front.

Amazon is pursuing an aggressive expansion roadmap in a bid to bring the benefits of local cloud infrastructure to more regions. The company said that it intends to launch seven new data center campuses in the U.K., France and China over the coming months as part of the effort.

Its competitors are working just as hard to keep up. Google has committed to adding more than 10 new cloud facilities through 2018, while Microsoft Corp. recently expanded its Azure infrastructure-as-a-service platform to the U.K. IBM Corp. followed suit two months later by launching a cloud data center of its own in the strategically located English town of Fareham.

Photo by Robert Hof