US-based multinational cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) wants to expand its local zones in SA, as well as some parts of the continent, to bring AWS infrastructure closer to end-users.
In 2020, the Amazon subsidiary launched the AWS Africa data centre region in Cape Town, with three availability zones.
Since inception, the AWS data centre has enabled hundreds of developers, start-ups and enterprises, as well as government and the education sectors, to run their applications and serve end-users in Africa, it says.
Speaking during a media briefing on the side-lines of the AWS Summit 2024, held in Johannesburg last week, David Brown, VP of AWS Compute and Networking Services, noted AWS is on a continuous drive to expand its local zones globally, with SA and other parts of the continent being in the pipeline.
AWS local zones are an AWS infrastructure deployment that make it possible to run low latency applications closer to end-users, or on-premises. They help organisations run applications that require single-digit millisecond latency, or local data processing, by bringing AWS infrastructure closer to their business operations, it explains.
“The availability zones we have in-country serve our customers to the highest level of redundancy, so we don't need many cloud regions. There are some applications where clients in SA would want those regions to be closest to them and for that, we invest in local sites or zones,” noted Brown.
“Local zones allow us to very quickly deploy our infrastructure closer to customers. We have used this broadly around the world. In the US, we have 17 local zones, and we are looking at a number of local zones in SA.
“We also have a number of local zones in Africa and we have more local zones planned, which we have spoken about. We have the capabilities to bring our infrastructure closer to customers and that's the important thing – not really the number of data centres − but rather meeting the customer's need to launch an application, or the need to scale, and support the customer in terms of capacity and operational stability.”
AWS local zones are available in 34 metropolitan areas around the world; 17 outside of the US and 17 in the US.
Meanwhile, AWS rival Microsoft is planning a third data centre in SA. The tech giant, which opened its South African cloud region in 2019, says it aims to build out its cloud infrastructure in Centurion, Gauteng.
Its current two data centres – in Johannesburg and Cape Town – are projected to drive economic growth in SA, and in turn contribute to the creation of over 100 000 jobs in the next few years.
Brown emphasised data security is a top priority for AWS, with its cloud services architected to migrate, and manage applications and workloads securely.
“The other thing that is critically important is stability; we want to make sure we protect customer data. We remain paranoid when it comes to security and that's why we never ever feel like it's a job done, because it's never a job done,” he stated.
During the conference, the company noted it is looking to introduce more generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications through Amazon Bedrock.
The service offers a choice of foundation models from several AI companies, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI and Amazon, through a single API.
“Amazon Bedrock has emerged as the preferred choice for numerous customers seeking to innovate and launch generative AI applications, leading to an exponential surge in demand for model inference capabilities. Bedrock customers aim to scale their worldwide applications to accommodate growth, and require additional capacity to handle unexpected surges in traffic,” said the company.
Share