AWS switches on its first African data centres in Cape Town

Amazon on Wednesday announced the opening of its first Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in Cape Town.

It’s also the first AWS data centre region on the African continent.

“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 in a press release.

The data centres have three availability zones with “independent power, cooling  and physical security”. These are also connected via ultra-low-latency networking infrastructure.

And in case you’re wondering, Amazon’s also thought about mitigating the impact of load shedding.

“Like all AWS infrastructure regions around the world, the Availability Zones in the Cape Town Region are equipped with back-up power to ensure continuous and reliable power availability to maintain operations during electrical failures and load shedding in the country,” it added.

The data centres are the latest investment in the city by Amazon. In 2004 it established a development centre. In 2016, it also opened an AWS office in Johannesburg, with CloudFront locations following in both Johannesburg and Cape Town in 2018.

Amazon’s data centres comes a year after its rival Microsoft opened its data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Feature image: AWS