AWS opens first African region
AWS has announced that its new AWS Africa Region in Cape Town, South Africa is now open and with this launch, Amazon’s cloud computing division now spans 73 Availability Zones within 23 geographic regions around the world.
Organizations and government agencies can now run their applications and server end-users in Africa with even lower latency while leveraging advanced AWS technologies.
Senior vice president of global infrastructure and customer support at AWS, Peter DeSantis explained in a press release that the opening of the new AWS Africa Region is part of the company’s continued efforts to support the growth of the continent’s local technology community, saying:
“The cloud is positively transforming lives and businesses across Africa and we are honored to be a part of that transformation. 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 organizations 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 organizations building in the cloud.”
AWS Africa Region
The AWS Africa Region has three Availability Zones which are each made up of one or more data centers that are located in separate and distinct geographical locations. There is also enough distance between them to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, though they are close enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and they are connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networking. AWS customers who are focused on high availability can even design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault-tolerance.
Just like the other 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.
With the launch of AWS’ new Africa Region, customers with data residency requirements and those looking to comply with South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), can now store their data in the country knowing they retain complete ownership of it and that it will not be moved unless they choose to move it.
