We are currently building AWS regions in Australia, Indonesia, Spain, India, and Switzerland.
UAE in the Works
I am happy to announce that the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region is in the works and will open in the first half of 2022. The new region is an extension of our existing investment, which already includes two AWS Direct Connect locations and two Amazon CloudFront edge locations, all of which have been in place since 2018. The new region will give AWS customers in the UAE the ability to run workloads and to store data that must remain in-country, in addition to the ability to serve local customers with even lower latency.
The new region will have three Availability Zones, and will be the second AWS Region in the Middle East, joining the existing AWS Region in Bahrain. There are 80 Availability Zones within 25 AWS Regions in operation today, with 15 more Availability Zones and five announced regions underway in the locations that I listed earlier.
As is always the case with an AWS Region, each of the Availability Zones will be a fully isolated part of the AWS infrastructure. The AZs in this region will be connected together via high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to support applications that need synchronous replication between AZs for availability or redundancy.
AWS in the UAE
In addition to the upcoming AWS Region and the Direct Connect and CloudFront edge locations, we continue to build our team of account managers, partner managers, data center technicians, systems engineers, solutions architects, professional service providers, and more (check out our current positions).
We also plan to continue our on-going investments in education initiatives, training, and start-up enablement to support the UAE’s plans for economic development and digital transformation.
Our customers in the UAE are already using AWS to drive innovation! For example:
Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) – Founded in 2006, MBSRC is home to the UAE’s National Space Program. The Hope Probe was launched last year and reached Mars in February of this year. Data from the probe’s instruments is processed and analyzed on AWS, and made available to the global scientific community in less than 20 minutes.
Anghami is the leading music platform in the Middle East and North Africa, giving over 70 million users access to 57 million songs. They have been hosting their infrastructure on AWS since their days as a tiny startup,. and have benefited from the ability to scale up by as much as 300% when new music is launched.
Sarwa is an investment bank and personal finance platform that was born on the AWS cloud in 2017. They grew by a factor of four in 2020 while processing hundreds of thousands of transactions. Recent AWS-powered innovations from Sarwa include the Sarwa App (design to market in 3 months) and the upcoming Sarwa Trade platform.
Stay Tuned
We’ll be announcing the opening of the Middle East (UAE) Region in a forthcoming blog post, so be sure to stay tuned!
— Jeff;
