In response to complex demands from European customers, particularly those in the public sector and highly regulated industries, AWS will launch their inaugural European Sovereign Cloud region in Brandenburg, Germany in December 2025.
This region will be available to all customers. What is it, and why should SaaS builders care?
A new region, and operating model
Unlike other AWS regions established in Europe, the Brandenburg region introduces an entirely new company operating model, designed to align with the EU’s objective of achieving “digital sovereignty”.
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will run under a dedicated German parent company, with local European leadership, and independent governance by a board of directors composed of EU citizens.
Operations, support, and customer service will also be provided only by EU residents who are located in the EU and subject to EU law.
The intent behind these choices is to meet the requirements of GDPR, the NIS2 Directive, and the upcoming EU Data Act which have created a need for cloud infrastructure that provides verifiable data sovereignty. AWS are also aiming to be compatible with country-specific requirements for sovereignty, such as Germany’s BSI C5
Data sovereignty means that data created or stored within a country’s borders is governed by that nation’s laws and regulatory frameworks. Traditional AWS regions are too closely associated with the USA to be compatible with data sovereignty requirements of some organisations, particularly those in the public sector.
The ownership and governance structure used by AWS for this Sovereign Cloud is designed to provide a higher degree of legal and operational protection against extraterritorial access requests, making it more difficult for US authorities to compel access to data held in this region.
Although at launch there will be just one new AWS region within this Sovereign Cloud, AWS will be building others, as part of a €7.8 billion investment.
A new partition
AWS groups its regions under a number of “partitions”. Every region is part of exactly one partition. If you haven’t come across this terminology before, it’s probably because you’re used to working within the standard partition, which is where commonly-used regions like Dublin, Paris, and Frankfurt are held.
AWS China and AWS GovCloud (US) are both distinct partitions, containing their own regions. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud adds a new partition to this list.
Each partition has its own IAM stack, and billing and usage metering systems, because even this access and financial metadata is required to remain independent in order to meet sovereignty requirements.
If you deploy your SaaS product across multiple standard AWS regions today, you’ll be familiar with the fact that you only need to handle IAM policies and billing in one place. If you have customers who need you to deploy resources into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud for them, you’ll need a new set of IAM and billing configurations for that partition too, similar to the way you’d have to work if you have Chinese or GovCloud customers.
Service availability
Anyone used to working across partitions will be aware that not all services are always available. In fact, the same is true of other AWS Regions: not every service is available everywhere.
At launch, around 90 of AWS’s existing 240+ services will be available in the Brandenburg region - detailed in this blog post. This includes the common compute, storage, database, security, and networking features you might expect. AWS CodeDeploy is provided, though CodePipeline and CodeBuild are surprisingly absent.
Some of the more specialist services are missing, for example the IoT services are not included in this launch, nor are most of the video and media processing services.
AWS Marketplace will be available from launch, and offerings procured from there could help bridge the gap for some workloads - though Marketplace vendors will need to do work to make sure their products can be made available in the new region.
Pricing and billing
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be billed in Euros by default, from an EU entity.
AWS has a “cost following” pricing model, which means per-service pricing differs across regions, according to the relative costs of running those services in those regions, though pricing dimensions are the same everywhere (e.g. if you pay per-gigabyte for a service in one region, you’ll pay per-gigabyte elsewhere too, though the per-gigabyte cost may differ).
Although at the time of writing AWS haven’t yet released pricing information for this new region, we can expect that things will be more expensive there, to cover the costs of the new governance structure.
As a reference point, pricing in the US GovCloud partition, for example, is 20% more expensive than the equivalent services in nearby us-east-1.
AWS European Sovereign Cloud for SaaS
If you’re a SaaS business, and you have potential buyers whom you already know need stronger data sovereignty commitments than the standard AWS regions can offer, making your application available on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud could make it possible to sell to them, unlocking new revenues.
Make sure you’re familiar with the pricing model in this new region, and factor that into your product pricing for customers who need it.
Bear in mind that whilst it will be technically possible to connect this region to your existing SaaS Control Plane, buyers who care about data sovereignty are unlikely to accept this, and you’ll need to re-implement that Control Plane in the new region too.
If you already sell your product on the AWS Marketplace, and you have customers who’ll want to deploy from there into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, make time in your roadmap to implement and test this delivery model there.
With all the above said, if your SaaS business isn’t EU-owned and operated, you might very well find it difficult to sell to customers with this sort of sovereignty requirement because of that.
We’ve been an AWS SaaS Services Competency Partner since 2020. If you’re building SaaS on AWS, why not book a free health check to find out what the 2023 SaaS SI Partner of the Year can do for you?
This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.
