Amazon Web Services Inc. today inaugurated its first cloud region, or data center cluster, in Africa, 18 months after first announcing plans to extend its platform to the continent.

The new region is located in Cape Town, South Africa, which represents something of a full circle for AWS. The Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary’s Cape Town development center created the original version of the EC2 compute service 14 years ago.

A region in AWS parlance is a cluster of three or more cloud data centers in the same area. The facilities are interconnected, but are located a safe distance apart to reduce the risk of any localized disruption taking them all offline.

AWS’ new Cape Town region should make the platform more appealing to South African organizations by reducing latency for users and applications that connect to its cloud. The Amazon subsidiary will also be in a better position to serve international firms with users in Africa. In the tech industry, Slack Technologies Inc., Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Snap Inc. are among the companies that run their services at least partially on AWS.

“Africa (Cape Town) is the 23rd AWS Region, and the first one in Africa. It is comprised of three Availability Zones, bringing the Global AWS Infrastructure to a total of 73 Availability Zones,” AWS senior developer advocate Sébastien Stormacq wrote in a blog post.

AWS’ recent updates to its CloudFront offering may lay the groundwork for potential future data center expansions in Africa. CloudFront is AWS’ content delivery network and the provider periodically extends the platform to new regions via so-called edge locations.

A few months before announcing plans for the Cape Town region, the provider set up an edge location in the city, and it more recently added nodes in Johannesburg and Nairobi, Kenya. The latter two cities, both major business hubs, could be strong candidates for any future cloud facilities AWS may build in Africa.

Microsoft Corp. already has a presence in Johannesburg as well as Cape Town with its rival Azure platform. Google LLC, in turn, is building a subsea internet cable that will stretch from Lisbon, Portugal to South Africa with branches extending to other African nations. The search giant said last year that the link will provide 20 times more network capacity than previous subsea cables linked to Africa by harnessing a technology called space-division multiplexing. 

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