AWS to Launch a Second Region in India

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced expansion of its services to include a second infrastructure region in India by mid-2022. The new AWS Asia Region, which will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, will join the existing nine AWS Regions and 26 Availability Zones across Asia in India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Globally, AWS has 77 Availability Zones across 24 infrastructure regions, with announced plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in India. For more information on AWS’s global infrastructure, go to: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/.

“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, Amazon Web Services. “Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, we’re 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.”

"We are pleased that AWS has chosen Telangana as the location for its second region in India. Hyderabad is an important talent hub for IT professionals and entrepreneurs, and with the increased adoption of cloud computing, we are set to see a transformation in the way businesses in south India harness the power of IT,” said K.T. Rama Rao, Minister for Information Technology, Electronics & Communications, Municipal Administration and Urban Development and Industries & Commerce Departments, Government of Telangana. “Combining the unique resources of Telangana with AWS, the world’s leading cloud, will boost economic development, power digital-led innovation, and establish a cloud centre hub for the rest of the country.”

AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ 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 networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will provide customers with even lower latency across southern India. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of Indian organizations, from startups to enterprises and the public sector, will have additional infrastructure to leverage advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services including compute, storage, analytics, artificial intelligence, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, serverless, and more to drive innovation.

Customers and APN Partners welcome the news of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region

Millions of active customers use AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world. Indian organizations that are moving their mission-critical workloads to AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and increase agility include: Ashok Leyland, Aditya Birla Capital, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, ClearTax, Dream11, Druva, Edelweiss, Edunext, Extramarks, Freshworks, HDFC Life, Mahindra Electric, Ola, Oyo, Policybazaar, Quantela, RBL Bank, redBus, Sharda University, Swiggy, Tata Sky, YuppTV, Zerodha, and many more.

National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange e-Markets Limited (NeML) is the leading national exchange in India offering web-based platforms for trading in a host of commodities to various markets and primary producers, including farmers, traders, and intermediaries. Following a fire in April 2018 in the NeML datacenter, the exchange migrated 50 applications to AWS Cloud. “We’ve experienced first-hand what it means to have our primary and disaster recovery workloads run on AWS Cloud and welcome the announcement of a second AWS Region in India. It will give us even greater options to build in redundancy, real-time availability, and security for our applications and data,” said Ravindra Shevade, Chief Operations Officer, NeML.

HDFC Life, established in 2000, is one of India’s leading Life Insurance providers, offering a range of solutions for protection, pension, savings, investment, annuity and health. HDFC Life has always believed in investing early in technology and  continuously thinking of making life simple for the customer. “In the past few years, we have accelerated our digital journey, and AWS has helped us migrate key applications to the cloud. We leveraged AWS capabilities in creating data platforms, and exploring  disruptive technologies has enabled us to better respond to the needs of our customers.  We share a common aim: focusing on addressing  customer needs and using technology to address them, " said Parvez Mulla, Chief Operating Officer of HDFC Life.

DSP Investment Managers (DSPIM) is one of the premier asset management companies in India with a track record of over 20 years of investment excellence offering investment products across the risk—reward spectrum, including equities, exchange traded funds, and fixed income portfolios. It is part of the DSP Group—one of the oldest and most respected financial services firms in India. “The immediate benefits we realized after migrating more than 50 workloads to AWS in 2019 were a reduction in operational overhead, digital transformation, and the adoption of a data-driven culture within our business. Our investor transaction platform built on AWS now allows us to reimagine our investors’ digital experience. A second AWS Region in India allows us to satisfy regulatory requirements and further improve our availability and resiliency,” said Ashish Bajaj, Chief Technology Officer of DSP Investment Managers.

Mumbai headquartered CEAT, the flagship company of RPG Enterprises, is one of India’s leading tire manufacturers. It produces over 35 million tires a year and has a strong presence in global markets. “In 2018, we selected AWS as our platform of choice, hosting all our IT applications and deploying SAP S/4 HANA on AWS. Since then, our journey with AWS has been very smooth –no challenges and no hiccups. We were able to fully concentrate on our core IT jobs and have been able to achieve a much higher level of operational efficiency in the core function,” said U. C. Singh, Chief Information Officer, CEAT.

YuppTV is one of the world’s largest internet-based TV and on-demand service providers of South Asian content, spread across the US, Canada, Europe, Middle East, Australia, and India. YuppTV offers more than 250 TV channels, over 5,000 movies, and more than 100 TV shows in 14 languages. “We chose AWS for our over-the-top (OTT) platform because of the global reach it provides. This helps our team seamlessly manage similar architecture set-ups across the world. AWS’s presence in multiple regions across the world helps us further reduce the latency of our media-heavy workloads. With AWS, we are able to scale the platform as required for any peaks in our workloads as per the events happening around the world, thus helping us run on AWS in a cost-optimized fashion,” said Anil Kumar, VP Technology  YuppTV.

Tens of thousands of government agencies, educational institutions, and non-profits around the world are already using AWS to address a diverse set of use cases, from complex government systems to mission-critical intelligence projects dealing with large volumes of sensitive data.

Common Service Centers (CSCs) are simplifying the delivery of citizen-centric services in rural India using AWS. “We have been able to simplify the delivery of citizen-centric services and benefit from AWS’s massive economies of scale, pace of innovation, global security certifications, and agility in a pay-as-you-go model without requiring complex licenses,” said Rishikesh Patankar, Chief Operating Officer- Education, Skills & CSC Academy, Common Service Centers (CSC) e-Governance Services India Limited.

BYJU’S is the creator of one of India’s most popular K-12 learning apps that offers personalized learning programs across mobile devices using world-class teachers, proven pedagogical methods, innovative technology, and data science to engage with remote students across grades. “We require a reliable cloud environment that scales on demand as the business keeps growing. We also need to analyze valuable student feedback and capitalize on those insights quickly in order to provide a more personalized learning experience. We have more than 15 million students using BYJU’S mobile app, and we could not support that number without being on AWS. As we expand the business in India and look for new ways to reach students, an additional AWS Region in India will help support that growth,” said Prakash Ramachandran Chief Technology Officer, BYJU’S.

CropIn is a full-stack agri-tech organization providing smart software-as-a-solution (SaaS) solutions to agri businesses globally, to maximize productivity across the board. CropIn has built a digital solution for agri stakeholders, farmers to tackle climate change challenges and adapt faster to climate-smart agricultural practices, especially in flood and drought-prone regions. “AWS is the centre of our technology architecture, helping us build our infrastructure at scale without worrying about challenges related to set up or management in production. We were able to meet the customer growth without much change in our system, by using AWS. As we scale our platform that currently serves 6.1 million acres and 2.1 million farmers across more than 60 countries and 9,400 crop varieties, AWS’s solutions will play a vital role,” said Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO, CropIn.

Amazon Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcomed the arrival of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region. The APN includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) around the world. APN Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. APN ISVs and SIs working in India include Accenture, BlazeClan, BluePi, Capillary, Cloud Kinetics, Deloitte, Freshworks, Hostin, Manthan, Minfy Technologies,  Powerupcloud, Progressive Infotech, Redington, and Umbrella Infocare.

Blazeclan, a long-standing APN Premier Consulting Partner focused on the financial services industry, has helped customers across India, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand adopt AWS. With more than 300 AWS-certified resources across six AWS competencies, Blazeclan has managed more than 120 large migrations in APAC. “AWS has always believed in a long-term mindset, which is a crucial component for our customers as they embark deeper within their digital transformation initiatives. The second region in India will help our customers in regulated industries, such as banking and financial services, move ahead with confidence in their cloud migration journeys,” said Varoon Rajani, Founder and CEO, Blazeclan.

Minfy Technologies is an APN Premier Consulting Partner focused on SAP and has managed over 750 engagements, more than 35 SAP HANA implementations, and assisted more than 400 first-time customers adopt AWS Cloud. “The second region in India will further benefit our ERP customers who want to run their critical workloads on a cost-effective and secure platform,” said Vijay Jain, Founder, Minfy Technologies.

Amazon and AWS investing in India

The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region demonstrates Amazon’s continuing investment in India. AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region opened on June 27, 2016, enabling customers in India to save costs, accelerate innovation, increase speed-to-market of new products and services, and expand their geographic infrastructure footprint in minutes. In May 2019, AWS expanded its services to include a third Availability Zone in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region to support rapid customer growth and provide more choice, flexibility, the ability to replicate workloads across more Availability Zones, and even higher availability. AWS has expanded its services through edge locations in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Kolkata.

AWS is also continuing to invest in the upskilling of local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in India through programs such as AWS Academy and AWS Educate. AWS Academy provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognized certifications and in-demand cloud jobs. AWS Educate provides student access to AWS services and content designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud computing, with tens of thousands of Indian students joining the program since it began.

In August 2019, Amazon inaugurated its largest campus building globally in Hyderabad. Spread over 9.5 acres, the campus is built to support more than 15,000 employees and reaffirms Amazon’s commitment to India.