AWS is now African AF as it opens Cape Town region in South Africa

Named AF-SOUTH-1 and near some handy routes to Europe and West Africa

AWS has opened its first region in Africa and named it AF-SOUTH-1.

The cloud colossus announced its South African efforts in October 2018 when it promised to flick the on switch “in the first half of 2020.” It’s met that promise with 69 days up its sleeve.

The new facility offers three Availability Zones, eight EC2 instance types and 46 services by The Register’s count. Among them is the import/export service that slurps data from Snowball devices, which we mention as an indicator of the level of local investment.

AWS was beaten into Africa by Azure, which arrived in March 2019 with two regions – one in Cape Town and another in Johannesburg. AWS has offices and a CloudFront presence in the latter city.

AF-SOUTH-1 is being advanced as a fine way for local users to get cloudy while complying with local privacy laws. Cape Town also has four fat submarine cables linking it to several West African nations and terminating in Europe, making the new region an option for many nations. ®