THE DATA CENTRE INTERVIEW
hen Amazon Web Services( AWS) set out to build its European Sovereign Cloud, the ambition was clear: deliver the full AWS hyperscale experience – every API, every service, every performance benchmark – while guaranteeing that customer-created metadata, operations and infrastructure remain entirely within the EU.
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud represents a massive engineering undertaking. It replicates AWS’ s entire infrastructure stack within Europe, for Europe, and was completed in half the time it took to build regions just three years ago.
Automation is the engine behind accelerated data centre deployment Colm MacCárthaigh, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, has spent 18 years at the company and several of those years leading the design and delivery of the European Sovereign Cloud. His background is in networking and data centres, and he draws on a bovine analogy to explain the philosophy underlying modern data centre construction at AWS scale.
“ There’ s a saying when it comes to servers – that you want to manage servers more like cattle than like pets,” he says.“ When you get to a certain scale, you don’ t want to know the individual names of your servers anymore. You instead want to have automated everything, templated everything, and you’ re not thinking about naming individual servers. That’ s a sign of when you’ re at scale.”
“ There’ s a saying when it comes to servers – that you want to manage servers more like cattle than like pets”
Colm MacCárthaigh VP & Distinguished Engineer AWS
That principle now extends to the data centres themselves. AWS operates 39 geographic regions globally, a number Colm acknowledges has grown well beyond what any individual could catalogue from memory.“ We have to manage and build those now through automation first,” he says.“ Consistency and templatising – all of that becomes very, very important, and it makes a huge difference for our customers, because we’ re also able to build much more quickly because of that automation.”
The payoff for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud was measurable. AWS built the new offering in half the time previously required for a standard region – and this despite the fact that the AWS European Sovereign Cloud demanded additional services and back-end systems that a typical region would not include.“ We actually built even more than we usually do, in half the time,” Colm says.“ All of that is driven through automation. That’ s the main thing that gets us there.”
24 July 2026