Amazon CloudFront Announces New Edge Locations in Johannesburg and Bangalore

Amazon CloudFront’s Global Network

Since launching Amazon CloudFront in November 2008, we’ve been continuously expanding our infrastructure footprint around the world to improve availability and performance for content delivery. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of two new Edge locations: one in Johannesburg, South Africa, and one in Bangalore, India. The Edge location in Johannesburg is Amazon CloudFront’s first PoP on the African continent. The addition of these two locations brings CloudFront’s global network to 119 Points of Presence in 58 cities, across 26 countries.

Amazon CloudFront Expanding AWS’ Presence In South Africa

AWS first established its presence in South Africa with a Development Center in Cape Town in 2004. Since then, AWS has expanded its presence in South Africa by launching Direct Connect in December 2017 and today adds its first CloudFront Edge location in Johannesburg. Amazon CloudFront’s expansion into South Africa further improves availability and performance of content delivery to viewers in the region. We expect that customers who use Amazon CloudFront to reach viewers in South Africa will see performance improvements of as much as 75% from reduction in latency for their content delivery. We’re also happy to announce that Amazon CloudFront will be launching another Edge location in Cape Town in the coming weeks.

In addition to reducing latency, these Edge locations also bring the full suite of benefits provided by Amazon CloudFront such as Lambda@Edge, Field Level Encryption, and Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, as well as seamless integration with other AWS services like AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Each of our new Edge locations are built to the same high standards as our other CloudFront Edge locations around the world, including infrastructure and processes that are all compliant with PCI, DSS, HIPAA, and ISO to ensure secure delivery of the most sensitive data.

We already have many customers across Africa using AWS to run their mission critical workloads but two that are particularly excited about the arrival of the new Edge locations in South Africa are online travel company Travelstart and software development company Afrozaar. Jan-André le Roux, CTO at Travelstart, said of the news, “For Travelstart, web performance plays a central role in delivering a good user experience to our customers. With the announcement of a CloudFront Edge location in South Africa, we will not only accelerate our content but also better leverage other service like AWS Shield and AWS WAF to protect us from DDoS and other malicious attacks.”

Clinton Bosch, CTO at Afrozaar, stated, “Serving clients in the broadcast, media, and ecommerce industries, the services and applications we build must offer high availability and fast access to data rich content. This is one of the main reasons we have worked with AWS from day one, and this is why we are excited to welcome the new CloudFront Edge locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town. What this means is that our customers will now enjoy lower latency and higher data transfer speeds, enabling a faster delivery of news, entertainment, and images to their audiences. CloudFront also integrates effortlessly with our application servers providing an auto-scaling environment that quickly responds to unpredictable traffic surges.”

Get Started With Amazon CloudFront

To learn more about Amazon CloudFront and how to get started, visit https://thinkwithwp.com/cloudfront/getting-started/. You can also easily get started by working with a member of the Amazon CloudFront AWS Partner Network listed here, https://thinkwithwp.com/cloudfront/partners/.

Information about pricing for CloudFront, including pricing for the new South Africa Edge locations, can be found at https://thinkwithwp.com/cloudfront/pricing/.

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