AWS Outposts comes to SA

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made AWS Outposts generally available 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.  

Outposts adds native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any datacentre, 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 consistent hybrid experience. 

South African customers 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.  

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

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 datacentre 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.” 

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.