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On April 22, 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that its The Cape Town region had been launched.
The region is called “Africa (Cape Town)” with the label “af-south-1”.
The launch of this local region is great news for South African developers and companies, who will be able to access low latency links to AWS services and cloud-based applications.
MyBroadband spoke to Amazon Web Services about the applications enabled by the AWS Cape Town region launch.
POPIA compliance and low latency
“Incorporating the AWS Infrastructure Region means that developers, businesses, startups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), educational institutions, and governments can take advantage of AWS to start their own businesses, drive the innovation, create new products and services and help African citizens, “AWS told MyBroadband.
“In addition, AWS infrastructure regions meet the highest levels of data security, compliance, and protection.”
With the new region, customers with data residency requirements and those seeking to comply with the Personal Information Protection Act (POPIA) can now store their content in South Africa with the assurance that they retain full ownership of their data. and they will. not move unless they choose to move it. “
This will mitigate the data privacy headache faced by many companies as the effective POPIA app draws closer, allowing them to store their data in the cloud using the AWS Cape Town region.
“An AWS region is a physical geographic location where we have a group of data centers,” AWS told MyBroadband. “Each region is made up of isolated locations known as Availability Zones.”
“By offering the three Availability Zones in South Africa, connected via low latency links, customers can easily deploy high availability applications with even lower latency for their customers and end users and keep their data within their AWS region” .
Services offered
Amazon web service Region and services page details all available services offered in each region of the world.
Below is a list of all services offered by the AWS Cape Town region at the time of writing.
| Cape Town Region – Services Offered | ||
|---|---|---|
| Amazon API Gateway | Amazon aurora | Amazon CloudWatch |
| Amazon DynamoDB | Amazon ECR | Amazon ECS |
| Amazon ElastiCache | Amazon EBS | Amazon EC2 |
| Amazon Elastic MapReduce | Amazon Elasticsearch service | Amazon glacier |
| Amazon Kinesis video footage | Amazon Redshift | Amazon Route 53 private DNS |
| Amazon SNS | Amazon SQS | Amazon S3 |
| Amazon SWF | AWS artifact | AWS Auto Scaling |
| AWS Certificate Manager | AWS CloudFormation | AWS CloudTrail |
| AWS CodeDeploy | AWS Configuration | AWS Database Migration Service |
| AWS Direct Connect | AWS Elastic Beanstalk | AWS Key Management Service |
| AWS Marketplace | AWS Personal Health Dashboard | AWS Server Migration Service |
| AWS Shield Standard | AWS pass functions | AWS support |
| AWS Systems Manager | AWS Trust Advisor | AWS X-Ray |
| Elastic load balancing | VM Import / Export | |
Partner Comments
MyBroadband spoke to local tech companies that have partnered with AWS for the implementation of their Cape Town region about possible applications of the expanded local presence.
Synthesis
Head of Synthesis for Cloud Services Darryl Govender said the launch of the AWS Cape Town region is a game changer for local businesses.
“Customers now have access to world-class cloud services, which meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection; right in your backyard, ”said Govender.
“Amazon’s investment in South Africa started in 2004 when they opened a Development Center in Cape Town.”
“Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) was one of the team’s main achievements, and the AWS SA region launch commends its triumphant return; EC2 has returned home, ”he said.
Govender said that by harnessing the power of the AWS cloud, customers can benefit from increased speed, increased security and superior reliability.
“The main benefits are the reduced latency offered by close geographic proximity to a local AWS region, as well as customers who now benefit from the ability to confidently store data in South Africa while maintaining full control over all movement. of data; thus complying with the next Personal Information Protection Law (POPIA) “.
“The region currently provides access to the full suite of core IaaS solutions offered by AWS, as well as a range of Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions to enable customers to further benefit from AWS’s extensive experience in managing and platform operation at scale, “he said.
“In addition, customers will have access to the AWS Marketplace, which provides a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors.”
He added that AWS will continue to increase these regional service offerings over time, prioritizing new service launches in line with local customer demand.
Teraco
Teraco has been a partner of AWS Direct Connect since 2017 and AWS Direct Connect is available at the Teraco data center facility in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
The AWS Direct Connect service enables customers to connect directly to their AWS resources in an AWS region.
Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo said the opening of AWS Africa in Cape Town is excellent news for South Africa and the entire continent.
“The presence of AWS Africa will have a significant impact on local and business cloud service providers based in Africa, enabling them to deliver better end-user experiences,” said Hnizdo.
“Lower latency and higher resilience will improve the overall user experience, and AWS in Africa will help meet customer data locality and sovereignty requirements.”
He added that Africa promises significant growth and great user acceptance over the next decade.
“The role of the Internet and cloud deployments within Africa is important, and how improving access and accessibility will help sectors such as agriculture, communications, education and financial services prosper and grow,” he said.
Dimension data
Dimension Data Cloud CEO Grant Morgan said the launch of AWS’s Cape Town region will greatly increase the speed at which companies can launch products to market.
“The launch” democratizes “IT more so that even the smallest companies can take advantage of the platform’s advanced features and functions, at an affordable cost,” said Morgan.
“Businesses can experiment and innovate faster, quickly testing proofs of concept and reducing their time to market.”
“The ability to deliver ultra-low latency across an African region optimizes latency-sensitive application performance for local businesses,” he added.
“This, coupled with direct high-bandwidth connectivity to AWS, is a compelling argument for lowering the total cost of ownership for the cloud, lowering barriers and increasing accessibility. The net effect is that this encourages faster cloud adoption for more applications by more customers. “
However, Morgan pointed out that not all the functionalities of the AWS platform will be available on the first day.
“This is the same as Microsoft when Azure launched its local data centers. Right now, only a quarter of the full list of AWS platform services is available in the Africa region. ”
“While the ones here are by far the majority of use cases, there will be some applications that require special PaaS features only available abroad,” he said.
“With AWS’s global backbone, a cross-region hybrid is the answer.”
Now read: How Dimension Data deals with massive spikes in traffic and remote work
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