Amazon Web Services (AWS) is opening a new data center in Sao Paolo, Brazil, making it the first major cloud provider to launch in South America. It’s the eighth data center for AWS and the second one announced in the past two months. In November, AWS announced the opening of a data center in Oregon.

The new AWS region will help support a fast growing technology culture taking root in Brazil that cloud service providers see as a major emerging market.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels:

 In particular, South American IT-oriented companies are seeing very rapid growth. Case in point: over the past 10 years IT has risen to become 7% of the GDP in Brazil

Erica Brescia is CEO for BitNami, which provides what it calls an app store for the cloud. The company has close ties to AWS. The company offers pre-packaged application stacks that its customers launch on services such as AWS. From the BitNami blog:

We are particularly excited about the launch of this new region because a large and very rapidly growing number of BitNami users are based there. In light of that, we are also working on adding Brazilian Portuguese support to the BitNami WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal Stacks, which means that users will be able to deploy those apps with the language packs already installed and configured.

The new South America (Sao Paulo) region supports the following services:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related services (Elastic Block Store, Virtual Private Cloud,Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling).
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
• Amazon SimpleDB.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS).
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce.
• AWS CloudFormation.
• Amazon CloudWatch.

AWS will offer parts of the service in Portugese. In addition, AWS has added an AWS team, which is standard course when AWS opens a new data center in an international region.

 EnStratus Founder George Reese said to me tonight in a Twitter exchange that they are localized in Portuguese primarily because they see Brazil as a critical market. EnStratus is a cloud management  provider for deploying and managing enterprise-class applications in public, private and hybrid clouds.

“This gives Brazilian consumers of cloud services an IaaS solution entirely under their jurisdiction.” Reese said. “It is the first major cloud provider with a significant presence in the Southern Hemisphere. Brazil is a huge emerging market.”