Cape Town All Set To Host AWS Summit Tomorrow

The African leg of the AWS Summit 2017 gets underway in Cape Town tomorrow, with the South African city hosting the only African edition of this key global event for Amazon Web Services.

Amazon’s cloud computing division has planned to organize 30 Summits this year.

And the company is already coming off of a very successful show in London a few days back, where an estimated 6,000 attendees gathered, alongside UK technology leaders of companies like BP, Deliveroo, among others.

The choice of Cape Town, of course, comes as no surprise.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy was all praise for the Cape Town AWS team late last year. Speaking at the re:Invent Conference that took place in December 2016 in Las Vegas, the cloud boss said that the company was proud of the quality in the team, and was planning to continue to grow it.

In fact, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was originated for South Africa in 2005, and is now a key part of the solutions the cloud provider offers:

“It is true that EC2 was originally built by a team of about a dozen people in Cape Town and our Cape Town team has gotten much larger than that and they manage, build and run huge parts of EC2. That team has been fantastic. Really, there is no EC2 and there is no AWS without that team and we are really proud of the quality of that team that we have in Cape Town and we will continue to build it up.”

Jassy is not expected to make an appearance at this event tomorrow, but considering the fact that AWS has no presence in Africa when it comes to availability zones or geographic regions, attendees will be keen on finding out whether Amazon has plans to change this.

A datacenter in Africa would be a massive step forward.

AWS did, however, recently opened an office in Johannesburg to support its customer base in South Africa, and it complements the Amazon Development Center in Cape Town that has been in operation since 2004.

A number of presentations are scheduled at this event, and a lot of action, including some from the CTO of Amazon.com, Werner Vogels, is expected.