Amazon Web Service launches Outposts Racks in Nigeria

Global e-commerce tech company, Amazon Web Service (AWS) has announced the launch of AWS Outposts to enhance the delivery of its comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offerings in Nigeria. This perhaps is the first step in establishing a presence in Nigeria following an announcement that it will expand to the country in April 2023.

AWS Outposts are fully managed and configurable computing and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware to allow customers to run AWS services on-premises, including compute, storage, and databases, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud.

AWS Outposts rack brings along with it an AWS infrastructure and operating models to data centres, co-location spaces, and on-premises facilities. With AWS Outposts rack, customers can use the same APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in the AWS Regions to deliver a consistent experience.

Speaking on the development, Amrote Abdella, General Manager at AWS, Sub-Saharan Africa, said;

“We are excited to bring AWS Outposts rack to Nigeria as we continue to deliver advanced cloud services to meet AWS customers’ business needs. Customers in Nigeria who have workloads that require low latency, data processing, or data storage on premises can benefit from AWS Outposts.”

“These workloads include applications that might need to generate near real-time responses, communicate with other on-premises systems, or control on-site equipment, such as factory floor equipment, health management systems, and retail point-of-sale systems. Customers can also use AWS Outposts rack to securely store and use customer data in Nigeria, which is important for organizations in highly regulated industries and data sovereignty requirements”, he added.

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What the AWS Outposts bring

AWS Outposts rack enables customers to build and run applications on-premises using the same programming interfaces as in AWS Regions. With AWS Outposts, customers can choose from a range of general, compute, memory, storage, and graphics-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, both with and without local storage options, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume options, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) on Outposts.

Customers can then run a broad range of AWS services locally, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and EMR, and they can connect directly to regional services like Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon DynamoDB through public or private connections.

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What customers are saying about the AWS launch

In response to the development, Paystack, one of Nigeria’s fast-growing start-ups that utilize AWS services to build powerful B2B payments and growth tools for thousands of Africa’s most ambitious businesses has welcomed the launch of AWS outposts stack, stating that it brings further advancement to the Nigeria tech ecosystem.

“AWS’ reliability has enabled us to seamlessly scale our operations, and exponentially grow transaction volumes. We are excited by the launch of AWS Outposts rack in Nigeria which brings cloud-scale innovations and services to Nigeria’s tech ecosystem,” .

Ezra Olubi, Paystack Co-founder and CTO

In the same vein, 54Gene, a health technology company that has successfully built its Genomics Infrastructure & Insights Ecosystem (GENIISYSTM) platform on AWS, enabling them to collect and analyze diverse datasets to unlock scientific discoveries expressed their excitement at the launch of a statement by the Vice president of the company.

According to Francis Osifo, vice president of 54Gene,

“Using AWS, we have been able to deploy new digital services faster than it would have taken us previously. Continuous innovation is part of 54Gene’s DNA. The launch of the AWS Outposts rack in Nigeria allows us to extend and run AWS services on-premises. We are thrilled with this.”

For the last 15 years, AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

Also part of the features includes its Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 84 Availability Zones (AZs) within 26 geographic regions, with announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

Millions of clients trust AWS to power their infrastructure, make them more efficient, and cut expenses. These clients include the biggest corporations, the fastest-growing startups, and the top government organizations.