Amazon Web Services (AWS) has on Thursday announced the availability of AWS Outposts in South Africa.
AWS Outposts aims to deliver fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with hardware that allow customers to run AWS compute, storage, database, and other services on-premises, while connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud.
AWS Outposts also brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to any datacentre, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Customers can use the same AWS APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in the AWS cloud.
South African customers who have workloads that require low latency, data processing, or data storage on-premises can benefit from AWS Outposts. It can also be used to store and process customer data in South Africa.
“We are excited to bring AWS Outposts to South Africa. Since the launch of the AWS Africa Region in April, customers have been expanding their use of AWS services, and have asked us for a consistent way to develop and manage their applications both on-premises and in the cloud. With AWS Outposts, customers can enjoy a truly consistent cloud environment using native AWS services to operate IT environments across their on-premises locations and the cloud,” said Prabashni Naidoo, Director at Amazon Web Services South Africa.
Early adopters of AWS Outposts include SENTECH SOC Limited, the national signal distributor and provider of digital content delivery services for the South African broadcasting and telecommunications sectors.
Tebogo Leshope, Chief Operations Officer at SENTECH, said, “Working with AWS has enabled us to shorten the lead time to service in our market, and reduce provisioning costs by moving over-the-top and video-on-demand catchup services to the cloud. The addition of AWS Outposts supports to our datacenter cloud burst strategy, which will enable us to send broadcasting workloads to the cloud when demand for computing capacity spikes – thereby transforming broadcasting and real-time content distribution in Africa. AWS Outposts will also enable us to move free-to-air content to the cloud and launch radio on-demand services. Through this, we will be able to rapidly innovate and improve our customer experience.”
AWS Outposts customers can choose from a wide range of compute, storage, and graphics-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, both with and without local storage options, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume options.
Customers can a host of AWS services locally, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), and can connect directly to regional services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets or Amazon DynamoDB through private connections.