Amazon opens first African Amazon Web Services datacentre in South Africa

Amazon has opened its first Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacentre in Africa located in Cape Town, South Africa. This is the 23rd AWS Region, and the first one in Africa. It is comprised of three Availability Zones, bringing the Global AWS Infrastructure to a total of 73 Availability Zones.

With this addition of this new region, businesses can deploy workloads and store their data in South Africa. This enables all organizations to bring lower latency services to their end-users across Africa, and allows more African organisations to benefit from the performance, security, flexibility, scalability, reliability, and ease of use of the AWS cloud.

This new Region is a continuation of the AWS investment in 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 Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

The opening of this new region is timely with the increased demand for cloud services due to the coronavirus pandemic due to businesses embracing bandwidth-intensive remote working options like video conferencing and people consuming internet-based services.