The Most Useful Offered Services From AWS Africa
Amazon Web Services makes another impact on the tech industry, increasing its real estate in the global market with its new region, AWS Africa.
Amazon announced the launch of AWS Africa, hatching in Cape Town, South Africa. AWS Africa is the first region on the continent consisting of three Availability Zones. The Cape Town zone provides organizations with infrastructure scalability and lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa. The new launch expands AWS's influence, now with 23 Regions and 73 Availability Zones across the globe, serving customers in over 190 countries.
It continues AWS investments in South Africa, introducing Direct Connect in 2017, Amazon CloudFront in 2018, and two new locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Through AWS Africa, entrepreneurs and organizations can utilize secure infrastructure services for world-class security, availability of compliance, and data protection.
The public sector can also leverage forward-looking technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI). African Developers, startups, enterprises, government firms, education institutions, and nonprofit organizations can begin to address issues in Africa, such as expanding education and achieving scientific breakthroughs and financial services.
Experts believe Africa still trails the rest of the world in technological advances and needs to move quicker than others to avoid dependence on different economies. AWS Africa opens a road map for the countries across the continent to endure the fourth industrial revolution within Africa. The innovative services can help make the process of “catching up to the rest of the world” more prosperous.
The Cape Town Region extends AWS's 15-year union with the motherland, which is home to one of the youngest populations in the world — making this generation uniquely invaluable during Africa’s digitization revolution. AWS Learning and Traning platform is a great tool to use to ensure this generation leads the next frontier in AWS Africa.
Cape Town can be a roadmap for other potential AWS Regions and Availability Zones in Africa. Let us take a look at some of the most effective services accessible in AWS Africa.
AWS Application Hosting
AWS offers a package of individual services that can be intertwined to address an entity’s overall needs or use a particular service to fix a simple problem.
Companies like Living Goods — a door-to-door health service that uses an app to provide data for its workers — will benefit from the new region. Living Goods emulated a successful beauty company AVON’s business model, with plans to scale
Thanks to AWS Africa, Living Goods can utilize a robust list of application services supplied by the company to better assists their local community health workers while they are selling health services and products to customers.
African companies can use content distribution networks like Amazon CloudFront to reach a global audience with reliable high performance. This service can develop a reliable healthcare system in rural communities in the sub-Saharan.
Amazon DevPay provides easy-to-use billing services to customers who need consumer-based financial services. Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Amazon EC2 are available to design a unique infrastructure to handle scalability ambitions.
AWS Securities
The new Cape Town zone will equip companies with data and content protection through various secure AWS security services.
Public Sectors, government firms, and entrepreneurs within the financial industry can support and protect their data by designing tight infrastructures within their organization’s systems.
One of AWS's security gems is Amazon Elastic Container Service, better known as Amazon ECS. Global tech corporations like Samsung, Ubisoft, and GoPro used this service for their most delicate applications. The versatile service provides secure containers while guarding growth and scalability.
Other services, like AWS PrivateLink and AWS Shield, help securely manage applications and cloud administration. Home Entertainment company, Netflix, uses AWS Shield to defend against the most common cyber attacks like DDoS that target and disrupt a company’s network resources.
AWS Cloud
AWS Cloud services are the most recognizable and popular among customers and tech enthusiasts. The new generation of on-demand cloud services has helped turn AWS into Amazon’s most profitable subsidiary company.
Cloud services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) implement secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
Space organization NASA needed better functionality and storage for their infinite amount of videos and photos. They adopted AWS services to answer this challenge; individually, Amazon EC2, bolstered NASA storage infrastructure, producing cost-efficient scalability. NASA pays for only what it uses during peak and downtimes.
NASA couples that with cloud support services like Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Services), which supports uploaded data, media, and assets. Elastic Load Balancing manages incoming traffic and distributes the uploaded information to Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions.
AWS CloudFormation is another industry-leading service that allows customers to manage and control the application stacks and resources needed for web and mobile applications. It gives access to infrastructure components and enables them all from one central command center. This simple but effective service can help African companies build and reshape their infrastructure with just text files or programming.
A financial company, Zoona, provides African entrepreneurs with a way to make electronic money transfers to residents in local communities. The company has served over 1.5 million people in the sub-Saharan, aiding them to acquire financial services, transacting over $1 billion through their “Zoona Agents.”
Zoona answers a problem within the sub-Saharan, but to scale their services, they have adopted a list of AWS services, one of which is Amazon EC2. Their IT Team realized the issues in their prior infrastructure with microservices, including web access, business logic, and databases, transferring it all to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances. These instances support Zoona’s environments for development, user acceptance testing, quality assurance, training, and production.
The transition to AWS reduced their IT cost by 50% while creating a more extensive and agile infrastructure.
Closing
These are just some of the many AWS services that are available for the sub-Saharan African community. Investing in Africa allows AWS to train young Africans on their services, ultimately creating jobs and weathering the wave of the new industrial revolution. These cheap but powerful services create scalable opportunities for African companies to serve more Africans, advance the continent’s technology landscape, and address issues that plague the new technological maturity of the motherland.
