AWS Confirms Plans For New Datacenter In South Africa

It was only a matter of time! Amazon Web Services has set its sights on a new datacenter in South Africa, which would make it the first such presence for the cloud giant in the African continent.

This was revealed by the AWS chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, during an event in the country.

Talk about such plans was already in the air prior to the commencement of the African leg of the AWS Summit in Cape Town last week. And Vogels, who was attending the event, confirm this by revealing that the group was currently working on understanding the local market.

Not just South African entrepreneurs, but those across the continent.

His words to Business Times, on the sidelines of the Cape Town summit:

“We have a lot of customers here already, especially when it comes to young business … but also larger companies, before opening up a region here.”

Talking to the 1,200 or so developers from Africa that gathered at the summit, he said that cloud computing was the new normal, and both small businesses and large enterprises are now shifting their workloads to the cloud.

The cloud is where companies are now starting up, as it provides no restraints on development.

The CTO also touched upon the fact that all regions are different, but the expectations for growth in South Africa are in the same ballpark as India.

Before Amazon established a region there, before it set up a datacenter and related infrastructure, the country had 70,000 businesses using their services. This figure saw a 60% increase in nine months after launch, with a total of 125,000 customers hopping onto the Amazon Web Services platform.

Werner Vogels said that he expects similar growth for the country, once the new region goes live, which would be important not just for South Africa, but other parts of the continent, too.