Alexa for business only available in US East?

Question

So my company is settled in Europe and wants to use Alexa for Business to manage Alexa devices. As far as I know Alexa for Business is currently only available in US East(N. Virginia). Could someone explain me what this means? I am new to AWS and Alexa and want to find out what pitfalls could arise from this szenario.

Answer 1

AWS Regions are independent collections of data centres ("Availability Zones") in a geographic area. All data and services created in one region remain within that region.

New AWS services are typically introduced in one region (N. Virginia) and then spread out over time.

As at the time of writing this Answer (March 2018), Alexa for Business is available in the N.Virginia and Ohio regions.

You can use the service from either of these regions. The only real pitfalls are data governance (information being kept in the USA instead of Europe) and latency due to distance. You could start experimenting with the service, with the expectation that it will eventually be available in an EU region.