Following the recent launch of CloudFront, our global content delivery network (CDN) service, in South Africa, is the launch of Amazon Route 53 in both edge locations, further improving availability and performance for customers and end users in the region.
By Michael Needham, senior manager: solutions architecture at AWS
Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service, designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications. The two new edge locations will help customers see improvements of as much as 75% in DNS query latency.
For more than nine years global companies of all sizes, from Hulu, Intuit, Allergan, Slack and Spotify, to small businesses running WordPress, have benefitted from an easy, secure, and cost effective way to distribute content, and accelerate applications, websites, and APIs, using Amazon CloudFront.
Now our customers in South Africa can leverage Amazon CloudFront to securely deliver data, videos, and applications to users, enjoying performance improvements of as much as 75% from reductions in latency. The two new edge locations, which now include Amazon Route 53, are located in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
Combined with the launch of Direct Connect in Dec 2017, AWS is now offering a full range of networking and caching solutions to businesses in South Africa.
Amazon Route 53 is designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other.
Our customers’ websites, content, and applications delivered via Amazon CloudFront can use, in addition, the Amazon Route 53 service to create an Alias record for their domain, which points to the CloudFront distribution.
Route 53 is designed to automatically answer queries from the optimal location depending on network conditions. As a result, the service offers low query latency for end users.
Developers also benefit from tight integration between CloudFront and other AWS services. The solution is simple to use with Amazon Route53, to help speed up DNS resolution of applications delivered by CloudFront, and with Amazon S3 for storage and retrieval of data for their applications.
Amazon EC2 or even servers in on-premises data centers can be used as origin servers for content for CloudFront. This gives developers a powerful combination of durable storage and high performance delivery.
For users uploading content to the cloud via S3, which is common in archival and big data strategies of large Enterprises, can now benefit from Accelerated Upload via CloudFront. The content is uploaded locally at high speed and low cost at the edge within South Africa and then carried to S3 on the Amazon backbone network, at no further cost.
With CloudFront and Route 53 now available in South Africa, existing and new customers will be able to take advantage of the features and benefits of AWS infrastructure in South Africa.
Like other AWS services, Amazon CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering.