On June 27th, Amazon announced the immediate availability of their 6th AWS Region in Asia Pacific. This region is in Mumbai, India and it joins other regions in Asia Pacific including Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. With the addition of Mumbai, Amazon is now up to 35 Availability Zones across 13 geographic regions worldwide.
At launch, the Mumbai region will host a variety of AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Missing from the initial list of services available are Amazon IoT, Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Kinesis Firehose. A complete list of services provisioned can be found on the Asia Pacific Amazon Global Infrastructure page.
Amazon has 75 000 active customers in India including Ola Cabs and NDTV who have participated in early previews of the Mumbai AWS region.
Ola Cabs provides a mobile application that allows customers to arrange for car service in India. Ankit Bhati, CTO and co-founder of Ola Cabs, describes how AWS has contributed to the success of their mobile offering:
Technology is a key enabler, where we use AWS to drive supreme customer experience, and innovate faster on new features & services for our customers. This has helped us reach 100+ cities & 550K driver partners across India. We do petabyte scale analytics using various AWS big data services and deep learning techniques, allowing us to bring our driver-partners close to our customers when they need them.
AWS has also allowed Ola Cabs to increase the velocity of developing their microservices platform. By using AWS, Ola Cabs deploys changes more than 30 times per day across 100s of low latency APIs that service millions of requests per day.
NDTV, a media company founded in 1988, provides TV, video and mobile content to consumers around the world. NDTV’s relationship with Amazon goes back to 2009 when they started to deliver video and web content using AWS. NDTV has taken advantage of Amazon’s ability to scale AWS services. This scalability was required during the 2014 Indian election, when NDTV received a 26 fold increase in traffic, resulting in 13 billion hits on Election Day. NDTV welcomes Amazon’s increased presence in India. Kawaljit Singh Bedi, CTO of NDTV Convergence, further explains:
Our web and mobile traffic has jumped by over 30% in the last year and as we expand to new territories like eCommerce and platform-integration we are very excited on the new AWS India region launch. With the portfolio of services AWS will offer at launch, low latency, great reliability, and the ability to meet regulatory requirements within India, NDTV has decided to move these critical applications and IT infrastructure all-in to the AWS India region from our current set-up.
In a recent blog post, Werner Vogels – CTO at Amazon describes some of the factors driving Amazon’s additional investment in India:
A region in India has been highly sought after by companies around the world who want to participate in one of the most significant economic opportunities in the world – India, a rising economy that holds tremendous promise for growth, a thriving technology hub with a rich eco-system of technology talent, and more. We believe in the Indian market and are investing for the long term. With the Mumbai Region, we look to better serve end-users in India. We believe that with the launch of the Mumbai Region, AWS will enable many more enterprise customers and startups in India to not just reduce the cost of their IT operations, but embark on transformational innovations rapidly in critical new areas such as big data analysis, Internet of Things, and more.
Amazon is not the only public cloud provider to aggressively pursue the Indian market. Microsoft has 3 Azure regions in India, including Central India (Pune), South India (Chennai) and West India (Mumbai).
