Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect is now live in South Africa and located at Africa’s only vendor neutral data centre, Teraco.
AWS Direct Connect enables clients to directly connect to their AWS resources in an AWS region. The service is accessible via a direct cross-connect within Teraco or from the Teraco Cloud Exchange platform in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
Andrew Owens, Teraco technical manager, Interconnection & Peering, says that Teraco’s Cloud Exchange is a robust infrastructure platform, located in Teraco’s colocation facilities providing access to AWS Direct Connect: “This enables clients to build and manage private, SLA governed, connections to multiple clouds over a single physical connection. The Teraco Cloud Exchange, is Southern Africa’s only truly neutral switching platform between clients and multiple cloud on-ramps.”
Owens says that the benefits of AWS Direct Connect include dedicated connectivity to AWS regions, consistent network performance, and reduced bandwidth costs: “Reliable and predictable network performance are essential ingredients for the successful implementation of a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, as applications are expected to seamlessly operate between private and multiple public cloud environments. Through the addition of AWS Direct Connect, via the Teraco Cloud Exchange platform, enterprises and service providers can now establish predictable, high performance, SLA based connections in South Africa.”
In addition to launching AWS Direct Connect, Amazon also announced the availability of Amazon CloudFront in South Africa. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) offered by Amazon Web Services. Content delivery networks provide a globally-distributed network of proxy servers which cache content, such as web videos or other bulky media, more locally to consumers, thus improving access speed for downloading the content.
Amazon is hosting the AWS Summit Cape Town this week on 12 July 2018 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Owens is optimistic about the increased Amazon activity and says it shows increased interest in the potential of the continent: “Teraco is privileged to be the local interface to AWS Direct Connect and are looking forward to both attending, and presenting, at the Summit.”
Owens will discuss AWS Direct Connect and how to extend an on-premise network to AWS locations over Ethernet: “The Summit is a great opportunity for both experienced and those new to AWS to understand the platform. I am looking forward to sharing our experience and knowledge of AWS Direct Connect with our local community.”
Source: ScreenAfrica
