Kathy Gibson reports from AWS Summit in Sandton – AWS’s relationship with South Africa – and Cape Town, in particular – goes back a long way.
Indeed, a lot of the technology development that supports AWS’s global cloud services was developed by a small group of engineers in Cape Town.
David Brown, vice-president of AWS Compute and Networking Services, was part of that team.
Born in Port Elizabeth, Brown later moved to Cape Town and started working with a small team of engineers led by Chris Pinkham on the system that would later become Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2).
“It was an incredible journey – a group of South African engineers and students from University of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela University, Stellenbosch, and Wits – all working on the system that became the cloud we know today.”
EC2, which went into beta in 2006 and live in 2008, offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 750 instances and the choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help customers best match the needs of their workload.
It is the first major cloud provider that supports Intel, AMD, and Arm processors, the only cloud with on-demand EC2 Mac instances, and the only cloud with 400Gbps Ethernet networking.