AWS doubles down on India with new Mumbai availability zone

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services division of Jeff Bezos-led Amazon, is doubling down on India as it looks to add new customers and expand its business in the country by opening a new availability zone in Mumbai.

"We are opening up a third availability zone in Mumbai driven by the demand we are seeing from the region," said Peter DeSantis, vice president of AWS global infrastructure and customer support.

Availability zones are big data centres that ensure data protection and storage. Including the three Mumbai centres, AWS has 65 availability zones globally.

Conor McNamara, director of business development for the Asia-Pacific region at AWS, said India remains one of the key strategic markets for the company due to the strong ecosystem of partners in the country. "More than 50% of our partners in the APAC region are from India," he said, adding that the company will continue to keep investing in the company.

In an earlier interview with TechCircle, Nawal Hamarass, director of alliances and channel partners for Asia-Pacific at AWS, had said that India was a focus market for the company. “Nearly 60% of our partners are based outside the US, and out of all the partners that we added in the last year, 50% of them were from India and most of them were tech partners,” Hamarass said.

AWS works with two kinds of partners—consulting and technology, she had said. She added that AWS has a total of 40,000 technology partners from Asia-Pacific.

McNamara said that India was not only a key market but also an important delivery and support centre for the company. He added that the company had made significant investments to build a Bengaluru office recently and has been spending on training personnel in new technologies.  

The company said it was also focusing on hybrid solutions for India and hence was making VMware Cloud on AWS generally available in the country.

VMware Cloud on AWS is an integrated cloud offering jointly developed by AWS and VMware. It allows enterprises to migrate and extend their on-premises VMware vSphere-based environments to the AWS Cloud.

DeSantis said that the company had helped in migration of over 130,000 databases globally.

*The author is in Mumbai at the invitation of AWS.