AWS Launches Two Amazon CloudFront Edge Locations in the United Arab Emirates

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced the launch of two Amazon CloudFront Edge locations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Located in Dubai and Fujairah, the new Edge locations bring the full suite of benefits provided by Amazon CloudFront including deep integration with compute and security services like Lambda@Edge, AWS Shield, and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF). The new Edge locations give customers in the region an improved experience for their end users, including faster content delivery and added cybersecurity protection. Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of 138 Points of Presence (including 127 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 63 cities across 29 countries.

In addition to the new Amazon CloudFront Edge locations, AWS also launched AWS Direct Connect in Dubai in August. AWS Direct Connect makes it easy for customers to establish a dedicated private network connection between AWS and their datacenter, office, or colocation environment. With AWS Direct Connect, customers can connect to all their AWS resources in any global AWS Region and transfer their business critical data directly between their premises and AWS.

“We are thrilled to continue expanding our presence in the Middle East and to be bringing even more advanced cloud technologies to customers in the UAE,” said Andy Isherwood, AWS Vice President and Managing Director EMEA. “The Middle East is an important region for AWS and the UAE is a key hub for many of the Middle East’s most innovative start-ups and enterprises. We look forward to further supporting these organizations with our new Edge location infrastructure as they accelerate their cloud adoption.”

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. It is also integrated with AWS, including physical locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as software that works seamlessly with AWS’s services. Customers can start using the service today and could see performance improvements of up to 90 percent in reduced latency for their content delivery as a result of the local Edge locations.

The higher accessibility to services and improved and faster user experience with Amazon CloudFront will help in driving the usage of more web applications across the Middle East, including eCommerce, mobile banking, media, entertainment, and government services. Like other AWS technologies, Amazon CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long term commitments or minimum fees and can be used either standalone or in combination with other AWS services, to provide additional benefits to customers.

Many organizations are welcoming the launch, including Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC Group). MBC Group is the largest media company in the Middle East and delivers premium content to over 150 million people across the Middle East, North Africa (MENA) region. Adriaan Bloem, Senior Manager Online Platforms, MBC Group said of the news, “We have been using AWS extensively for our digital properties including SHAHID.net, MBC.net, and GOBOZ, MBC’s Video on Demand service for kids. With the availability of these local Amazon CloudFront locations, we acquire better ways to manage our costs and gain a tremendous amount of flexibility – thus being able to offer an even better experience for our end-users.“

Also welcoming the launch of AWS Edge locations in UAE is Anghami, the number one music platform in the MENA region. Anghami today has over 50 million users and offers instant access to over 26 million songs. Elie Habib, Co-Founder and CTO at Anghami said of the launch, “We are very excited by the opportunities that the new AWS Edge locations will bring to our service, particularly being able to cope with dramatic peaks in traffic. For example, we see peaks of usage at night, in the morning, and especially when new music is released, which can mean a 300 percent increase in traffic. Having a local Edge location allows us to better cope with these fluctuations. Not having to worry about latency issues or data transfer speeds, because Amazon CloudFront is delivering our performance needs, frees us up to innovate in new ways for users to interact with the app, from anywhere in the world.”

Barry Judge, General Manager, UAE for Dubizzle, the leading online classifieds service in the Middle East, also said, “We have been using AWS for many years because of the speed and agility that it has provided us, and we are thrilled to see them bring more infrastructure closer to us. We are constantly releasing new application features and to be able to do that at increased speed is critical for our business and for the user experience. More importantly, security is central to everything we do and with the local AWS Edge location, we are able to improve the way we deliver our services, while at the same time benefit from a wide array of security features that come with Amazon CloudFront, particularly the AWS WAF. The embedded security features bring us peace of mind, and allow us to focus on how we can better serve our customers.”

The two AWS Edge locations and Direct Connect in the UAE form part of AWS’s increasing investment in the Middle East. In September 2017, AWS announced the Middle East (Bahrain) Region will be available in 2019. The AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region will have three Availability Zones, bringing flexible, affordable, reliable, and secure cloud computing technologies close to end users across the Middle East, helping organizations speed up their digital transformation initiatives and more rapidly innovate for the citizens of the region. This also adds to the offices AWS has in Dubai, UAE, and Manama, Bahrain with growing teams of account managers, solutions architects, partner managers, professional services consultants, support staff, and various other functions for customers to directly engage with AWS.