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AWS expands footprint in India with Hyderabad region
Amazon Web Services is investing $2.8bn in a second cloud region in one of the fastest-growing public cloud markets in the Asia-Pacific region
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing $2.8bn in a second cloud region in India to expand its footprint in one of the fastest-growing public cloud markets in Asia-Pacific.
Located in Hyderabad in the state of Telangana, the cloud region comprises three availability zones at launch and will be ready by mid-2022 to provide AWS customers with lower latency across southern India.
AWS currently operates nine cloud regions and 26 availability zones across Asia-Pacific, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The public cloud giant opened its first Indian cloud region in Mumbai in 2016 and added a third availability zone to that region in 2019.
“Businesses in India are embracing cloud computing to reduce costs, increase agility and enable rapid innovation to meet the needs of billions of customers in India and abroad,” said Peter DeSantis, senior vice-president of global infrastructure and customer support at AWS.
“Together with our AWS Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) region, we are providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency and availability across geographic locations.”
KT Rama Rao, Telangana’s minister for information technology, electronics and communications, said the new investment by AWS will boost economic development and establish a cloud hub for the rest of India.
On the skills front, AWS, which also operates edge locations in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata, said it will continue to upskill local developers, students and the next generation of IT leaders in India through programmes such as AWS Academy and AWS Educate.
In August 2019, Amazon opened its largest campus globally in Hyderabad. Spread over 9.5 acres, the campus is built to support more than 15,000 employees.
According to management consultancy Boston Consulting Group, India’s public cloud market is expected to grow from $2.6bn to $8bn with a compound annual growth rate of 25% between 2018 and 2023.
It said in a report: “The potential for deeper penetration of public cloud in India becomes all the more evident given that the market is still in an early stage in terms of public cloud and IT spending.”
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Large Indian organisations are already using public cloud services in a big way. Tata Capital, for example, is using virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa to deliver services, while the National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange has migrated 50 applications to AWS after a fire in 2018.
Besides AWS, Microsoft and Google have also established their presence in India. In 2019, Microsoft teamed up with Indian telecoms giant Jio to deliver cloud infrastructure services through two new datacentres being built in Gujarat and Maharashtra.
Microsoft is expected to deploy its Azure platform in the two facilities, which can house IT equipment consuming up to 7.5MW of power, to support Jio’s offerings.
In March 2020, Google said it plans to open a Delhi cloud region by 2021, its second one in India since it launched its Mumbai cloud region in 2017.
Google said the new region will enable Indian organisations to take advantage of its big data and infrastructure services onshore while complying with India’s data laws and regulations.
