Amazon Web Services Launches First African Data Centre In Cape Town -

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cape Town region has gone live today, April 22, 2020. AWS administrators can now enable the Cape town Region their account on the AWS portal. The region has been named ‘Africa- (Cape town)’ and labelled ‘af-south-1’

AWS regions have a number of data centres named availability zones. The zones provide cloud computing services to the region and nearby edge networks. They are also connected with redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.

The availability of Amazon Cape Town Region on AWS is great news to the South African developers as they do not have to use cloud storage and computing services with low latency from Europe or the United States region.

AWS currently has regions in China, South America, North America, Europe, Asia, Middle East and the Pacific.

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In late 2018, Amazon announced that it would open an infrastructure region in South Africa with three availability zones with the headquarters in Cape Town. The company then expanded rapidly and hired over 100 employees in July, 2019. However, The AWS Cape town page is still stating that it is coming soon, although no official launch date has been announced.

“We will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020,” Amazon said. “The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will consist of three Availability Zones.”

“The addition of the AWS Africa Region will enable organizations to provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa and will enable more African organizations to leverage advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more to drive innovation.”

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Confirming the Launch, Amazon Web Services have confirmed that the Cape Town Region is already operational on its platform as of today.

“Starting today, developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations can run their applications and serve end-users in Africa with even lower latency and leverage advanced AWS technologies to drive innovation,” the company said.

Partners and customers can now use the platform by accessing the AWS Cape Town Region Landing page

“Builders, developers, entrepreneurs, and organisations have asked us to bring an AWS Region to Africa and today we are answering these requests by opening the Cape Town Region,” said Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support Peter DeSantis.

“We look forward to seeing the creativity and innovation that will result from African organisations building in the cloud.”

AWS also said that its infrastructures meet the highest levels of compliance, data protection and security.

“With the new region, customers with data residency requirements, and those looking to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), can now store their content in South Africa with the assurance that they retain complete ownership of their data and it will not move unless they choose to move it,” the company said.

The new Africa (Cape Town) live screenshots are below.