AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) – Launch, Pricing, and What’s Next

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) has officially launched, promising full digital sovereignty for European workloads. But beyond the headlines, important questions remain: How does pricing compare to established AWS regions? Which services are really available today—and how complete are they? In this post, we share early hands-on insights from the ESC pricing calculator, highlight practical limitations around AI, CI/CD, and platform services, and give an honest first assessment of what architects and decision-makers should expect when evaluating AWS’s new sovereign cloud.

Introduction: A Cloud of One’s Own (in Europe)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) – a new, independent cloud designed specifically for Europe. It is fully located within the EU, physically and logically separated from existing AWS regions, and operated under European jurisdiction. The initial launch centers around a new AWS Region in Germany (Brandenburg), with plans to expand via sovereign Local Zones in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal as part of a multi-billion-euro investment in European cloud infrastructure.

The motivation is clear: digital sovereignty. Many European organizations – especially in the public sector and highly regulated industries – need strong guarantees around data residency, operational independence, and legal control. The ESC addresses these requirements by being operated exclusively by EU-based AWS staff, with no dependencies on non-EU infrastructure. Even in extreme scenarios, the cloud is designed to remain operational without reliance on other AWS regions. In short: sovereign by design, not as an afterthought.

Everyone Talks About the Launch – But What About Pricing?

Today, everyone is talking about the ESC launch, sovereignty, and compliance. What almost nobody is talking about yet is pricing. We were curious, so we did the work and conducted an initial evaluation to understand what “sovereign” really means in terms of euros and cents.

Early Pricing Findings from the ESC Calculator

AWS has already released a dedicated pricing calculator for the European Sovereign Cloud: https://pricing.calculator.aws.eu

A few interesting (and sometimes surprising) early observations:

• Prices are in euros
  The most obvious difference: pricing is shown in EUR instead of USD. This aligns well with the fact that ESC is billed from a European entity and removes the usual mental currency conversion.

• Only newer EC2 instance types are available
  No legacy instance families. Only modern generations are listed. One could say: old technical debt isn’t being dragged into the sovereign cloud.

• Architecture rebuilds can be tricky (for now)
  When trying to rebuild a customer SAP environment, we quickly hit a limitation: no AMD-based instances (e.g. r6a) are currently available. Only Intel-based (r6i) and Graviton instances can be selected. That’s not a blocker, but definitely something to consider for existing architectures.

• EBS pricing is missing in the calculator
  While you can create additional EBS volumes via the AWS Console, Amazon EBS is not yet available in the pricing calculator. Likely a temporary gap, but worth noting when doing early cost estimates.

Pricing Comparison: ESC vs. eu-central-1

To get a better feeling for the “sovereignty premium,” we compared ESC pricing with the standard eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) region. The result: roughly a 15% price increase across common services.

Some concrete examples:

The pattern is consistent: a noticeable, but not dramatic uplift. Compared to other sovereign or government-focused cloud offerings worldwide, this feels surprisingly reasonable.

A Surprisingly Broad Service Portfolio – Right from Day One

What really stands out is how many AWS services are already available in the European Sovereign Cloud.

For a solid Cloud Foundation, you get almost everything you’d expect:

• AWS CloudTrail
• AWS Config
• AWS Organizations
• AWS Control Tower
• GuardDuty
• and more

For a modern application and platform stack, core services are there:

• Amazon EC2
• Amazon EKS
• Amazon RDS
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon DynamoDB

And even AI / ML services are already included:

• Amazon Bedrock
• Amazon SageMaker

All of this, today.

Service Feature Availability: Present, but (Still) Evolving

While the list of available AWS services in the European Sovereign Cloud is already impressive, availability does not always mean full parity with established regions like eu-central-1. In practice, many services are present, but with functional limitations that are worth understanding early on.

A few notable examples:

• AWS Identity Center is currently missing
  Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) is not yet available and is currently planned for Q1 2026. This has direct implications for centralized identity and access management, especially in multi-account setups.

• Amazon CloudFront is scheduled much later
  CloudFront is not available today and is planned for the end of 2026. For globally distributed or latency-sensitive applications, this is an important architectural constraint.

• AWS Code* services are not available in the near term
  The classic AWS developer tooling is largely missing for now:

  • CodeDeploy is planned for Q2 2026
  • CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodePipeline are currently planned for Q1 2027

  This means that, for the foreseeable future, CI/CD pipelines and source code repositories must rely on external systems, such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or other third-party tooling. From a practical perspective, this is manageable—but it is an important consideration for platform and compliance architectures.

• Amazon Bedrock is available – but very limited
  As of today, Bedrock only offers Amazon Nova Lite and Amazon Nova Pro models. Popular third-party foundation models such as Claude, Mistral, or Llama are currently not available.
  In addition, advanced Bedrock features like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning, and other customization capabilities are missing. This significantly limits more advanced GenAI use cases.

• No GPU instances (yet)
  Currently, only t, c, m, r, and i instance families are available. GPU-based instances are missing entirely, which restricts AI/ML workloads to CPU-based machine learning and basic GenAI scenarios using Nova models. Training larger models or running GPU-heavy inference workloads is not possible at this stage.

• Feature gaps across many services
  When calculating prices and exploring service configurations, it became obvious that many services are available in principle but lack certain features. These gaps are usually not painful showstoppers, but they are noticeable when it comes to fine-tuning performance, scalability, or cost efficiency.

The good news: this feels like a deliberate starting point, not a dead end. AWS has been transparent about what is available, what is planned, and what is still missing.

To get a continuously updated view of available and planned services and features, AWS provides a dedicated overview in the AWS Builder Center: https://builder.aws.com/build/capabilities/explore?f=eJyrVipOzUlNLklNCUpNz8zPK1ayUoqOUUotLU7WTUnVTU0sLtE1jFGKVdKBK3QsS8zMSUzKzMksqQSqdsyrVEARqgUA4l8dog&tab=service-feature

Overall, while today’s limitations are real, I am confident this will improve quickly. AWS has a strong track record of closing feature gaps fast once a new region or environment is live – and the ESC will be no exception.

Final Thoughts

For an average ~15% pricing premium, AWS delivers a fully sovereign, independently operated cloud environment with a surprisingly broad and mature service portfolio. That’s a strong starting point.

If you’re building or migrating workloads with strict sovereignty, compliance, or regulatory requirements, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is no longer a theoretical option – it’s a very real and technically capable platform.

This feels less like a cautious experiment and more like AWS saying: “We’re serious about sovereignty in Europe.” And honestly, that’s a promising start.

Need guidance on AWS ESC?

If you’re evaluating the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, planning a migration, or need support in assessing architecture, pricing, or service readiness, we’re happy to help. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss your specific use case or next steps.