Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched the AWS Direct Connect in South Africa, making it the first time that the Amazon network has come to Africa, giving customers local access to redundant and diverse network infrastructure.
Having AWS Direct Connect in the country allows customers based in South Africa to have dedicated, reliable, and high bandwidth connectivity to the Amazon Global Network, bypassing the public internet. Customers can connect to all AWS infrastructure Regions around the world (except China) from locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town and their traffic will remain in the Amazon backbone network throughout the entire journey.
For many years AWS has been working with organisations of all sizes in South Africa, from the newest startups, like Entersekt, NicheStreem, and Paygate through to some of the most well-known, household names, such as Pick ‘n Pay and TravelStart to help them move workloads to the cloud. One of the main requests AWS has received from South African customers has been to help reduce costs and improve network performance from on-premises environments to AWS infrastructure Regions located in Europe, the US, and around the world.
The new AWS Direct Connect location in Johannesburg is located at the Teraco JB1 facility and in Cape Town at the Teraco CT1 facility. If customers have equipment within these facilities they can use Direct Connect to optimize their connection to AWS. If their equipment is located somewhere else, they can work with one of AWS’ APN Partners supporting Direct Connect or their carrier to establish a connection from their location to the Teraco AWS Direct Connection location nearest to them, and from there on to AWS.
This is good news for customers in South Africa for several reasons:
Reduced Bandwidth Costs
For customers in South Africa that have bandwidth-heavy workloads that they wish to run in AWS, AWS Direct Connect reduces their network costs, in that, by transferring data to and from AWS directly, they can reduce their bandwidth commitment to their Internet service provider.
Consistent Network Performance
Network latency over the Internet can vary given that the Internet is constantly changing how data gets from point A to B. When looking at the distance from South Africa to Europe, the US, or Asia, this can get magnified. With AWS Direct Connect, customers choose the data that utilizes the dedicated connection and how that data is routed, which can provide a more consistent network experience over Internet-based connections.
Elastic
AWS Direct Connect provides 1Gbps and 10Gbps connections, and customers can easily provision multiple connections if they need more capacity. Customers can avail lower bandwidth connections of 50Mbps to 500Mbps through our APN Partners supporting AWS Direct Connect. Customers can also use AWS Direct Connect instead of establishing a VPN connection over the Internet, avoiding the need to utilize VPN hardware that frequently can’t support data transfer rates above 4 Gbps.
With global access enabled, customers using AWS Direct Connect can reach their AWS resources in any region worldwide (except China). With global public VIFs (Virtual Interfaces), customers get all global Amazon public routes allowing global access to publicly routable services like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 etc. For private resources such as Amazon VPC, customers can use Direct Connect Gateway with private VIFs to reach multiple VPCs in multiple AWS regions from a single AWS Direct Connect location.
Customers can get started by logging into the AWS Management Console and ordering their AWS Direct Connect port today! Both Teraco CT1 and JB1 can be found in the EU West (Ireland) region. More details about AWS Direct Connect can be found on the website here:
https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/
