Amazon To Open AWS Middle East Region By 2019

Expansion! Amazon Web Services has confirmed plans to open a new Region for AWS in the Middle East by early 2019. Bahrain will be the location of the company’s first dedicated datacenters in the region.

The cloud giant officially announced this, saying that it will be launching an Infrastructure region in the country, which will be comprised of three availability zones — three discrete datacenters, each house in separate facilities, with redundant power, networking and connectivity.

Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services:

“As countries in the Middle East look to transform their economies for generations to come, technology will play a major role, and the cloud will be in the middle of that transformation. Some of the most gratifying parts of operating AWS over the last 11 years have been helping thousands of new companies get started, empowering large enterprises to reinvent their customer experiences, and allowing governments and academic institutions to innovate for citizens again. We look forward to making this happen across the Middle East.”

Amazon selected the Kingdom of Bahrain for its new hub partly due to the country’s focus on executing renewable energy goals and also because of its proposal to construct a new 100 MW solar power facility to meet the power needs.

Bahrain will be enacting data privacy, and data sovereignty laws in the next few months, which it believes are to become a key part of the country’s digital economy strategy.

Amazon Web Services has also outlined plans to launch an AWS Edge Network Location in the United Arab Emirates in the first quarter of 2018.

These developments and expansions are part of the company’s ongoing growth plans for the Middle East, and follow the opening of offices in Bahrain and the UAE earlier this year in January. It has made efforts to bring education, training, and startup support to the area.

Currently, AWS provides access to 44 Availability Zones across 16 Regions worldwide, with another 14 Availability Zones across 5 AWS Regions on track to come online by the end of 2018.

These are China, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, along with a second GovCloud Region in the United States.