Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the general availability of AWS Outposts in South Africa. AWS Outposts delivers fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allow customers to run AWS compute, storage, database, and other services on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud. According to the company, AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. With AWS Outposts, customers can use the same AWS APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in the AWS cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Customers in South Africa who have workloads that require low latency, data processing, or data storage on-premises can benefit from AWS Outposts. These include applications that may need to generate near real-time responses, communicate with other on-premises systems, or control on-site equipment, such as factory floor equipment, health management systems, and retail point of sale systems. Customers can also use AWS Outposts to securely store and process customer data in South Africa, which is important for organisations in highly regulated industries with data sovereignty requirements.

Prabashni Naidoo, director at Amazon Web Services South Africa, said, “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.”

With AWS Outposts, customers in South Africa can work with the AWS Partner Network (APN) to leverage their deep experience helping businesses move applications to AWS through all aspects of complex migration projects. These can include initial discovery and assessment, planning, migration, and operations, as well as cloud strategy and technology advisory services to migrate and run workloads on AWS Outposts.

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, COO 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.”

Also welcoming the arrival of AWS Outposts is AWS Partner Network Advanced Consulting Partner Vodacom Business. William Mzimba, CEO at Vodacom Business said, “We are excited to be the AWS Outposts launch partner in South Africa. AWS Outposts is a pivotal service for public and private sector customers who require keeping data inside their datacenters while taking advantage of the innovation offered by the AWS cloud. We are working with a number customers to accelerate cloud adoption, and we see AWS Outposts as an easy and highly secure way to bring one of the world’s most advanced cloud technologies to workloads that need to run on-premises. We look forward to helping our customers leverage AWS Outposts to more rapidly innovate.”

With AWS Outposts customers can choose from a 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 then easily run a broad range 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.