The launch of AWS Africa Region in Cape Town represents a great opportunity for Africa to strengthen the speed and reliability of connectivity, create jobs and optimise workloads.
This is according to Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems, a leading provider of end-to-end digital services and solutions and official AWS partner supporting the AWS Africa region.
AWS Africa Region has gone live and customers will be able to run their applications and serve end-users in Africa.
The AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region has three Availability Zones.
“We can confirm that there are indeed three availability zones (af-south-1a, af-south-1b, af-south-1c) and we have created test workloads in Cape Town,” said Grant Bingham, MD of Autumn Leaf in partnership with Obsidian.
While Bingham advised that for now use of the Availability Zones should be limited to non-production workloads while the central team performs some tests and monitoring of the environment, he said there are very clear benefits linked to the launch.
In terms of connectivity, it will largely remove dependency on international Seacom lines and enhance national connectivity but he stressed that some services do need international access.
“There will undoubtedly be latency improvements in speed. We’ll need to measure these but we can expect some significant improvements,” he said.
