Public cloud giant Amazon Web Services Inc. is wrapping up a busy end of year with the opening of a new region in France.

The AWS EU (Paris) Region is the company’s fourth region in Europe, alongside existing regions in Germany, Ireland and the U.K.

The decision to open a French region was taken in part due to a demand from Amazon’s French customer base, the company said. What with the EU’s General Data Protection Act set to come into force next year, many companies operating in the country will need to adhere to new data sovereignty rules that require their data to be physically located on French soil.

“We have tens of thousands of French customers using AWS from regions outside of France, but we’ve heard them loud and clear and are excited to deliver them an AWS Region in France, so they can easily operate their most latency-sensitive workloads or house any data that needs to reside on French soil,” AWS Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy (pictured) said in a statement.

The new region provides 3 availability zones to begin with. This means AWS now counts a total of 49 availability zones across 18 regions globally. AWS regions consist of availability zones that refer to its technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. The availability zones have enough distance between them to reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability significantly, yet they’re also located near enough for business continuity applications that require rapid failover.

Amazon is also planning to open another four regions, with a total of 12 availability zones in Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sweden in 2018, in addition to a second AWS GovCloud region in the U.S. by early 2019.

The move concludes a busy month for AWS, which just a week ago opened up its second region in China, offering two availability zones. The company also held its annual AWS re:invent technology conference at the beginning of this month, which saw it introduce a host of new products and services for its public cloud.

AWS said the new Paris region is open starting today, with a full list of services on offer available here.

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