The AWS Region in Africa that Jeff promised you in 2018 is now open. The official name is Africa (Cape Town) and the API name is af-south-1 . You can start using this new Region today to deploy workloads and store your data in South Africa.

The addition of this new Region 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. It enables organisations of all sizes to experiment and innovate faster.

AWS Regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection. With the new Region, local customers with data residency requirements, and those looking to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), will be able to 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.

Africa (Cape Town) 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 (AZ).

Instances and Services

Applications running on this 3-AZs Region can use C5d, D2, I3, M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and T3 instances, and can use a long list of AWS services including Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora (both MySQL and PostgreSQL), Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Events, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry, Amazon ECS, Elastic Load Balancing (Classic, Network, and Application), Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Redshift, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Artifact, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS Marketplace, AWS Mobile SDK, AWS Shield (regional), AWS Site-to-Site VPN, AWS Step Functions, AWS Support, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS X-Ray, AWS Import/Export

A Growing Presence in Africa

This new Region is a continuation of the AWS investment in Africa. In 2004, Amazon opened a Development Center 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). AWS has also added a number of teams including account managers, customer service reps, partner managers, solutions architects, developer advocates, and more, helping customers of all sizes as they move to the cloud.

In 2015, we continued our expansion, opening an office in Johannesburg, and in 2017 we brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa through AWS Direct Connect. In 2018 we launched infrastructure on the African continent introducing Amazon CloudFront to South Africa, with two edge locations in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and recently in Nairobi, Kenya. We also support the growth of technology education with AWS Academy and AWS Educate, and continue to support the growth of new businesses through AWS Activate. The addition of the AWS Region in South Africa helps builders in organisations of all sizes, from startups to enterprises, as well as educational institutions, NGOs, and the public sector across Africa, to innovate and grow.

The new Region is open to all: existing AWS customers, partners, and new African customers working with local partners across the region. If you are planning to deploy workloads on the Africa (Cape Town) Region, don’t hesitate to contact us. I am also taking advantage of this post to remind we have dozens of open positions in the region, for many different roles, such as Account Management, Solution Architects, Customer Support, Product Management, Software Development and more. Visit amazon.jobs and send us your resume.

More to Come

We are continuously expanding our global infrastructure to allow you to deploy workloads close to your end-users. We already announced two future AWS Regions in APAC: Indonesia and Japan, and two in Europe: Italy and Spain. Stay tuned for more posts like this one.

(Photo via Good Free Photos)