Cape Town has become Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) first African region following an announcement from the group earlier this week.
The total number of regions world-wide will increase to 23 with AWS now spanning 73 Availability Zones. An additional 12 zones are also in the works, planned for areas including Japan, Italy and Spain.
This move means enterprises, start-ups, developers, government and education organisations will be able to run applications with lower latency and leverage advanced AWS technologies that will help drive innovation.
“The cloud is positively transforming lives and businesses across Africa and we are honoured to be a part of that transformation,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support of Amazon Web Services. “We have a long history in South Africa and have been working to support the growth of the local technology community for over 15 years. In that time, builders, developers, entrepreneurs, and organisations have asked us to bring an AWS Region to Africa and today we are answering these requests by opening the Cape Town Region. We look forward to seeing the creativity and innovation that will result from African organisations building in the cloud.”
The AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region has three Availability Zones. AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones, which each comprise of one or more data centres and are located in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networking. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault-tolerance. Like all AWS infrastructure regions around the world, the Availability Zones in the Cape Town Region are equipped with back-up power to ensure continuous and reliable power availability to maintain operations during electrical failures and load shedding in the country.
AWS infrastructure regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection. With the new region, customers with data residency requirements, and those looking to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), can now store their content in South Africa with the assurance that they retain complete ownership of their data and it will not move unless they choose to move it.
Developers and businesses can access the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region beginning today. A full list of services and details on pricing is available at https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/
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