Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Top 3 Public Cloud Vendors, announced Monday that it will expand its cloud datacenter infrastructure to Middle East.
According to Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, the company plans to open a new region in Bahrain in early 2019. This will beat rivals Microsoft Azure (GCP), and Google Cloud Platform(GCP) in setting up cloud datacenters throughout the Middle East.
The new region of Bahrain will be open with three availability zone, bringing AWS’ global infrastructure count to 22 regions or 47 availability zones. This count includes regions still available, including those in China and Sweden, Hong Kong, France, and a second GovCloud area in the eastern United States. A region is a single location that has one or more availability zones. These availability zones in turn contain one or several datacenters.
Barr stated that AWS will also open an AWS edge location in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), during the first part of 2018, bringing the total number to 79.
In a separate blog post, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels noted that the upcoming Bahrain region builds upon AWS’ existing investments within the Middle East. AWS has established offices in Bahrain and the UAE earlier this year and has a number of partners in the region to assist customers in moving to the AWS cloud. Vogels stated that these partners include Al Moayyed Computers and Batelco, C5, du. DXC Technology. Falcon 9, Falcon 9, Infonas and Integra Technologies. ITQAN Cloud, Human Technologies. Kaar Technologies. Navlink, Redington. Zain.
AWS’ announcement of its first Middle East region cloud region comes at an era of rapid global expansion by the top public cloud vendors, in an effort to comply with increasingly stringent data sovereignty laws. AWS may be the first cloud provider to the Middle East, but Microsoft is the first to Africa. Microsoft announced plans in May to open two South African datacenters by 2018. GCP is currently preparing datacenters in Finland and the Netherlands for customers.
A map of AWS’ global infrastructure can be found here, for Microsoft here, and for GCP hier.
