Amazon Web Services finally goes live with its Cape Town region

Cape Town might still be finishing up its dry season, but it appears the clouds have arrived. And while the pending winter will hopefully bring plenty of much-needed rain, I’m not talking about weather here but rather the fact that an Amazon Web Services data centre has finally activated in Cape Town.

MyBroadband has reported on the news of the new data centre going live with subsequent confirmations through the company’s website showing that Cape Town can indeed be selected as a location for a new server, with the region named “Africa (Cape Town)” with the label “af-south-1”.

While Amazon has spoken about building a local data centre for a few years now and confirmed that one was in development, they have been very secretive on the details around it and have not released any official press release around it, while Amazon’s AWS Africa page still states that the Cape Town region is coming soon, with no official launch date announced:

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.

It’s likely the secrecy of the launch means that the company wants to do some more internal beta testing with clients before officially launching, but either way, this is positive news for South Africa. While we have always had a cloud presence in the country, having the worlds biggest cloud provider, its wide array of tools and platforms is likely going to be a game-changer and accelerate many companies moving to the cloud, especially the big financial institutions who have need to store their data locally.

It also means that budding developers and many start-ups can also move their services across to the local data centre where everything should run with much lower latency. Hopefully, we will see an uptick in companies utilising cloud technology to help them advance into the digital and e-commerce space.

Last Updated: April 22, 2020