Silver lining for SA in Amazon cloud
Explosion in data services expected as US giant rolls out in Cape Town, Joburg
● The long-awaited announcement this week that Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud division of Amazon.com, would open data centres in SA in 2020, sets the scene for an explosion in data services in this country.
It will follow hard on the heels of Microsoft, which is due to open two Azure data centres, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, in the next two months.
AWS sets up its data centres in clusters it calls infrastructure regions, of which it now has 19 worldwide, each representing substantial investment. The South African region, located in Cape Town, will be the first in Africa. Three availability zones — the AWS term for independent sites, each comprising at least one data centre — will be dispersed across the Cape Town metro.
The decision to base the data centres in Cape Town was rooted in both practical and historic reasons, said Geoff Brown, Sub-Saharan Africa regional manager for AWS.
“AWS has been operational in Cape Town since we opened the development centre in the city in 2004. Given our long history in the city, it made sense for us to also base an AWS region here,” he said.
The availability zones, he said, “refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for business continuity applications that require rapid failover”.
Each availability zone has independent power, cooling and physical security, and is connected to national backbone networks via local telecom carriers’ high-speed fibreoptic networks.
In the official AWS announcement from Seattle this week, CEO Andy Jassy was effusive in his praise of South African developers’ role in the core AWS cloud infrastructure, called EC2.
“Having built the original version of Amazon EC2 in our Cape Town development centre 14 years ago, and with thousands of African companies using AWS for years, we’ve witnessed first-hand the technical talent and potential in Africa,” he said.
“Technology has the opportunity to transform lives and economies across Africa and we’re excited about AWS and the cloud being a meaningful part of that transformation.”
AWS opened an office in Johannesburg in 2015, and in 2017 provided direct access to its Amazon Global Network for South African businesses through a service called AWS Direct Connect. That was extended in May 2018 to infrastructure points of presence in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Business Times reported at the time that the evolution of its local presence set the stage for the arrival of AWS data centres on the continent for the first time. Large AWS customers in SA include Absa, Standard Bank, Investec, Old Mutual and Pick n Pay.
Said Brown: “South African organisations of all sizes and developers were among the early adopters of AWS when we launched the services in 2006. Bringing an AWS region to SA means organisations will be able to provide even lower latency to end-users across Sub-Saharan Africa and will enable more African organisations to leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things and mobile services.
We’re excited about AWS and the cloud being a meaningful part of transformation
Andy Jassy
Amazon Web Services CEO
“Local AWS customers will also be able to store their data in SA with the assurance that their content will not move unless they move it. Those looking to comply with the upcoming Protection of Personal Information Act will have access to secure infrastructure that meets the most rigorous international compliance standards.”
The data centres would also spur job growth. It will result in AWS hiring, among others, data centre engineers, support engineers, security specialists, account managers and solution architects.