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Amazon Web Services (AWS), has launched its Cape Town data centres, the first on the continent.

The AWS Africa (Cape Town) region brings the Amazon.com-owned cloud giant’s “availability zones” to 73 worldwide in 23 geographic regions and comes a year after its most direct rival, Microsoft, launched two Azure data centres in South Africa, one in Johannesburg and the other in Cape Town.

“Starting today, developers, start-ups and enterprises, as well as government, education and non-profit organisations, can run their applications and serve end users in Africa with even lower latency and leverage advanced AWS technologies to drive innovation,” AWS said in a statement.

The Cape Town region has three availability zones. These zones each comprise of one or more data centres and are located in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications.

Each availability zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networking, AWS said.

Like all AWS infrastructure regions around the world, the availability zones in the Cape Town region are equipped with backup power to ensure continuous and reliable power availability to maintain operations during electrical failures and load shedding.

“With the new region, customers with data residency requirements, and those looking to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act, can now store their content in South Africa with the assurance that they retain complete ownership of their data and it will not move unless they choose to move it,” AWS said.