Amazon Web Services (AWS) officially launched its Cape Town region today, 22 April 2020. According to Amazon, an AWS Region in Africa could enable businesses and government organisations, including those focused on fighting the effects of COVID-19, to build cloud applications and store their data locally, while reaching end-users across Africa with even lower latency.
“The cloud is positively transforming lives and businesses across Africa and we are honoured to be a part of that transformation,” says Peter DeSantis, Senior VP of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support at AWS.
“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.”
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.
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.
With this launch, AWS now spans 73 Availability Zones within 23 geographic regions around the world and has announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones across four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, Japan, and Spain.
