Amazon Web Services has made two new announcements related to its cloud computing services. First, the company has launch AWS Directory Service, an authentication service that both integrates with and competes with Microsoft Active Directory. The service is available in several versions and starts at $36.50 per month.
Second, the company is opening a new data center in Frankfurt, Germany. The new facility will help the company serve European customers who are concerned about the security of data in American data centers following Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA. ?What we found with our German customers, maybe more so than other places in the world, is they have a lot of passion for the data to reside in-country,? said Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS. ?This allows current customers and maybe some prospective customers to move their workloads to AWS.?