Amazon Web Services Expands With First India Data Centres

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has expanded with a new region centred in Mumbai, India, building its first data centres in a country where it says it has about 75,000 customers.

The move sees Amazon coming into more direct competition with the likes of Microsoft, IBM and NTT, all of which have local data centres supporting India’s rapidly growing cloud-services market.

Global expansion

Amazon already counted major Indian companies such as Tata Motors, taxi-hailing firm Ola and broadcaster NDTV amongst its customers, but until now India-based firms relied upon facilities in Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney or Seoul, all of which are located in AWS’ Asia-Pacific region. (Amazon also has a distinct region for China, using a data centre in Beijing.)

The new centres add an Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) region, meaning quicker response times for locally based customers, the company said. Amazon now operates a total of 35 data centres, each mapped to what it calls an Availability Zone, in 13 regions.

Amazon now operates three Indian edge locations, which speed up content delivery, in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi, supporting features such as Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, and S3 Transfer Acceleration.

The Mumbai data centre will run core AWS services but currently certain features aren’t available, including CloudSearch, EC2 Container Service, AWS Directory Service and SimpleDB, Amazon said.

Competition

Amazon said in early 2015 that AWS had about 12,000 customers in India, indicating the rapidity of the company’s cloud expansion in the country. Amazon said it has committed $5 billion (£4bn) to its Indian e-commerce business and has hired 45,000 people there.

AWS is one of Amazon’s fastest-growing businesses and is expected to reach $10bn in revenues this year, about 8 percent of the company’s overall revenues, growing 64 percent in the first quarter year-on-year.

The company’s competitors have also been active in India, with Microsoft opening cloud data centres in three locations over the past year, IBM opening one in Chennai in the same period and Netmagic, now owned by Japan’s NTT, established longer.

AWS opened a data centre in Seoul in January.

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