In June 2021, Jeff Barr announced the upcoming AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. Today we’re announcing the general availability of the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region, with three Availability Zones and the il-central-1 API name.

The new Tel Aviv Region gives customers an additional option for running their applications and serving users from data centers located in Israel. Customers can securely store data in Israel while serving users in the vicinity with even lower latency.

AWS Services in the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region
In the new Tel Aviv Region, you can use C5, C5d, C6g, C6gn, C6i, C6id, D3, G5, I3, I3en, I4i, M5, M5d, M6g, M6gd, M6i, M6id, P4de (public preview only), R5, R5d, R6g, R6i, R6id, T3, T3a, T4g instances, and a long list of AWS services including: Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppConfig, AWS Application Auto Scaling, Amazon Aurora, Aurora PostgreSQL, AWS Budgets, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Cloudfront, AWS Cloud Map, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Directory Service, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Image Builder, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancing, Elastic Load Balancing – Network (NLB), Amazon EMR, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Fargate, Glacier, AWS Health Dashboard, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS Mobile SDK for iOS and Android, Amazon OpenSearch Service, AWS Organizations, Amazon Redshift, AWS Resource Access Manager, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Resource Groups, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Shield Standard, AWS Shield Advanced, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, VM Import/Export, AWS VPN, AWS WAF, and AWS X-Ray.

AWS in Israel
According to the Israel Ministry of Economic Industry, Israel is in the front line of the cloud computing era and “is known to be the ‘start-up nation’ of the number of global start-ups being produced. Over the past decade, Israel has produced over 2,000 start-ups, the majority of these start-ups are driven by software as a service (SaaS). Israeli cloud technology remains a strong promise in the market as new start-ups are continuously penetrating the market.”

AWS began supporting startups in Israel in 2013 through its AWS Activate program. In Israel, AWS works with accelerator organizations such as 8200 EISP, F2 Venture Capital – thejunction, and TechStars as well as venture capital firms like Entrée Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Pitango, Vertex Ventures Israel, and Viola Group to support the rapid growth of their portfolio companies.

Back in 2014, we opened an AWS office and a research and development (R&D) center in Israel. Since then, Amazon has expanded its R&D presence in the country, which now includes Prime Air and Alexa Shopping.

In 2015, AWS acquired Annapurna Labs, an Israeli microelectronics company, which has developed advanced compute, networking, security, and storage technologies for AWS—such as AWS-designed Graviton processors, AWS Inferentia, AWS Trainium chips, and the AWS Nitro System.

In 2018, we expanded to new offices in Tel Aviv, including AWS Experience Tel Aviv on Floor28 to support the growth of Israeli startups, enterprises, and government customers through technology-focused events and educational activities. Now, AWS Experience Tel Aviv on Floor28 is an education hub where anyone interested in AWS can attend industry events, workshops, and meetups, and receive free, in-person technical and business guidance from AWS experts.

In 2019, we launched the first AWS infrastructure in Israel, opening an Amazon CloudFront edge location. In 2020, we brought AWS Outposts and AWS Direct Connect to Israel, providing Israeli organizations with the ability to run AWS technology in their own data centers and establish dedicated connections back to the AWS Cloud.

In April 2021, the government of Israel announced that it had selected AWS as its primary cloud provider as part of the Nimbus contract. The Nimbus framework will enable government departments—including the ministries, education, healthcare, and municipalities—to accelerate their digital transformation by using AWS technologies.

AWS continues to invest in upskilling local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in Israel through programs such as AWS Educate, AWS Academy, AWS re/Start, and other Training and Certification programs.

AWS Educate and Academy programs are providing free resources to accelerate cloud-related learning and preparing today’s students in Israel for the jobs of the future. Israel colleges already participating in the AWS Academy program include the Bar Ilan University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Holon Institute of Technology, Jerusalem College of Technology, and University of Haifa. We also launched AWS re/Start to focus on helping unemployed or underemployed individuals to launch a new cloud career. You can now apply to AWS re/Start programs through Appleseeds, Sigma Labs Jerusalem, and Analiza Cyber Intelligence in Israel.

AWS Customers in Israel
We have many amazing customers in Israel who are doing incredible things with AWS, for example:

AI21 Labs – AI21 Labs offers access to its state-of-the-art proprietary language models through AI21 Studio for businesses to build their own generative artificial intelligence applications, as well as its consumer product, Wordtune, the first AI-based writing assistant to understand context and meaning. AI21 Labs scaled to hundreds of GPUs efficiently and cost effectively to build the Jurassic-2 family of language models. These models were trained with distributed and parallelized infrastructure based on Amazon EC2 P4d instances 400 Gbps high-performance networking supported by Elastic Fabric Adaptor (EFA).

Bank Leumi – Leumi is one of the leading banks in Israel and has over 200 branches across the country and dedicated teams using AWS to build an advanced banking services marketplace. In just 5 months, Leumi migrated 16 on-premises applications from its former Kubernetes solution to Amazon EKS Anywhere with no service interruptions. The bank’s new environment facilitates a consistent, scalable approach to deployments, saving time and money and increasing innovation velocity.

CyberArk – CyberArk is an AWS partner in the identity security industry. Centered on privileged access management, CyberArk provides the most comprehensive security SaaS offering on AWS for any identity—human or machine—across business applications, distributed workforces, hybrid cloud workloads, and throughout the DevOps lifecycle. CyberArk Identity Security Intelligence has integrated with AWS CloudTrail Lake to increase visibility and responsiveness associated with targeted threats. CyberArk Audit also delivers security event information to Amazon Security Lake.

Ichilov Hospital – The I-Medata Innovation Center of Ichilov Hospital uses AWS Control Tower to facilitate the fast, consistent, and secure creation of AWS accounts while protecting sensitive medical data. The center also relies on Amazon SageMaker to enable its scientists to build, train, and deploy advanced machine learning models for early detection of deterioration in COVID-19 patients. They had full protection of sensitive medical data on AWS while continuing to enable the productivity of researchers.

You can find more customer stories from Israel.

Available Now
The new Tel Aviv Region is ready to support your business. You can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Regional Services List.

With this launch, AWS now spans 102 Availability Zones in 32 geographic Regions around the world. We have also announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more Regions in Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand.

To learn more, see the Global Infrastructure page, give it a try, and send feedback through your usual AWS support contacts in Israel.

— Channy

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