Amazon Web Services has formally announced it will open an infrastructure region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) region will consist of three availability zones.
Currently, AWS provides 55 availability zones across 19 infrastructure regions worldwide, with another 12 availability zones across four AWS regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden, and a second GovCloud region in the US expected to come online in the coming months.
“Having built the original version of Amazon EC2 in our Cape Town development centre 14 years ago, and with thousands of African companies using AWS for years, we’ve been able to witness first-hand the technical talent and potential in Africa,” says Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services. “Technology has the opportunity to transform lives and economies across Africa and we’re excited about AWS and the Cloud being a meaningful part of that transformation.”
The new region is the latest in a series of AWS investments in South Africa.
In 2004, Amazon opened a development centre in Cape Town that focuses on building pioneering networking technologies, next-generation software for customer support, and the technology behind Amazon EC2.
WS has also built a number of local teams including account managers, customer services representatives, partner managers, solutions architects, and more to help customers of all sizes as they move to the cloud.
In 2015, AWS opened an office in Johannesburg and, in 2017, brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa through AWS Direct Connect.
In May of 2018, AWS continued its investment in South Africa, launching infrastructure points of presence in Cape Town and Johannesburg, bringing Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF to the continent and adding to the 138 points of presence AWS has around the world.
The addition of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will enable organizations to provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa and will enable more African organisations to leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more to drive innovation.
Local AWS customers will also be able to store their data in South Africa with the assurance that their content will not move without consent, while those looking to comply with the upcoming Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) will have access to secure infrastructure that meets the most rigorous international compliance standards.
Organisations across the African continent have been already begun moving their applications to AWS. Enterprises such as Absa, Investec, MedScheme, MiX Telematics, Old Mutual, Pick n Pay, Standard Bank, Travelstart and more use AWS.
African startups choosing AWS as the foundation for their businesses include Aerobotics, Apex Innovation, Asoriba, BusinessOptics, ColonyHQ, Custos Media, DPO PayGate, EMS Invirotel, Entersekt, graylink, HealthQ, JourneyApps, JUMO, Luno, Mukuru, NicheStreem, Parcelninja, Simfy Africa, Zanibal, Zapper, and Zoona.
African public sector organisations on AWS include the National Museums of Kenya (NMK).
Absa CIO Andy Baker comments: “AWS has been Absa’s primary cloud provider for the past three years. The reduction in latencies that will accompany their expansion to South Africa will further enable us to scale our cloud consumption.
“We no longer deploy bespoke hardware, SAN storage, or high-cost proprietary database solutions. Instead, our new tech stack utilises low cost, fully automated, logically partitioned, open source software, with realtime security and application monitoring.
“AWS’s track record of delivering enterprise ready and South African regulator-approved services to Absa has given us confidence to deploy services aimed at further reducing our operational costs and improving our cyber risk profile.”
MiX Telematics is another South African customer. “We started working with AWS in 2015 and decided to go ‘all-in,’ including migrating our full fleet and mobile asset management stack to AWS and shutting down our on-premises data centres over a period of 18 months,” says Catherine Lewis, cxecutive vice-president: technology at MiX Telematics.
“Through moving to AWS, we have been able to speed up innovation and increase system reliability, while reducing the time to get new ideas into production from months to minutes.
“While we already use AWS globally in Ireland, Australia, and the U.S., an AWS infrastructure region in Africa will accelerate our innovation even further, improve our service, and ultimately reduce the costs of supporting our base of over 700 000 vehicles.
“We are also in the process of migrating over 7 000 costly Microsoft SQL Server databases to Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS PostgreSQL, and adopting new technologies, such as AWS’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning services, to help more intelligently manage vehicle efficiency, improve driver safety, and ultimately enable us to drive greater value for our customers.”
Pick n Pay is one of the largest retailers in Africa, with more than 80 000 staff across 1 560 stores. The group is moving its e-commerce and data analytics systems to AWS.
“By moving our e-commerce and mobile customer application to AWS, from our previous managed services model, we estimate we have saved significantly on our total cost of ownership over the past year,” says Chris Shortt, GM of information services at Pick n Pay. “The relationship, performance, reliability, and cost savings has been positive and has led us to move our SAP Business Warehouse systems to certified AWS X1 instances.
“Selecting AWS highlights the differentiated, cloud-first thinking they bring to us as opposed to more traditional, and less agile, service providers. The scale, security, speed, and customer focused nature of AWS is something we’ve become accustomed to and look forward to expanding our use of their services as the South African region becomes a reality.”