American ecommerce and web hosting platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has opened its first physical point of presence (PoP) in South Africa.
The company said on Monday that it has launched two new Edge locations, one in Johannesburg and the other in Bangalore in India.
The Edge location in Johannesburg is Amazon CloudFront’s first PoP on the African continent. The addition of these two locations brings CloudFront’s global network to 119 PoPs in 58 cities, across 26 countries, it said.
Amazon has long had an association with South Africa, having operated a development centre in Cape Town since 2004.
“Since then, AWS has expanded its presence in South Africa by launching Direct Connect in December 2017 and today adds its first CloudFront Edge location in Johannesburg,” it said in a statement.
“Amazon CloudFront’s expansion into South Africa further improves availability and performance of content delivery to viewers in the region.”
It said customers who use CloudFront to reach viewers in South Africa will enjoy performance improvements of as much as 75% from a reduction in latency (network round-trip times) for content delivery. Cape Town will also get a CloudFront PoP in the coming weeks, Amazon said.
In addition to reducing latency, the Edge locations will offer services such as Lambda@Edge, Field Level Encryption and Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration. It will offer integration with other AWS services such as AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The launch of the South African PoPs come as Microsoft prepares to unveil two Azure data centres in South Africa — one in Johannesburg and the other Cape Town. These data centres are expected to be launched later this year.
