AWS Launches First CloudFront Edge Location in Nigeria
New Amazon CloudFront edge location offers customers in Nigeria up to 20 percent improvement in latency and added cybersecurity protection
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the launch of the first Amazon CloudFront edge location in Lagos, Nigeria.
The new edge location provides secure, reliable, high-performing connectivity to the rest of the AWS global network and support for AWS edge services including Amazon CloudFront, AWS Shield, and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).
Customers in Nigeria can expect up to 30 percent improvement in latency for data delivered through the new edge location to provide end users faster, more responsive applications.
AWS has the largest global infrastructure footprint of any provider. With the launch of the Amazon CloudFront edge location, Nigeria is now connected to the AWS global infrastructure network of more than 450 points of presence (POPs) and 13 regional edge caches in more than 90 cities across 50 countries, designed and built to deliver the most secure, reliable, and scalable cloud computing environment with the highest quality network performance.
The new AWS edge location brings the full suite of benefits provided by Amazon CloudFront, a highly secure content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of data, video, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs) to users worldwide.
By caching content at the Nigeria edge location, local Amazon CloudFront customers can benefit from improved performance, network security, and application-level protection.
Amazon CloudFront improves security with traffic encryption and access controls. All Amazon CloudFront edge locations are protected against infrastructure-level distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) threats that use an always-on network flow monitoring and in-line mitigation service that minimizes application latency and downtime when used with AWS Shield.
Customers can create security rules to protect applications against common web exploits and bot attacks by enabling AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).
Amazon CloudFront integrates with AWS services including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as origins for applications.
There is also support for serverless code to be run close to end users for customization with Lambda@Edge.
“Our existing customers, from startups to established commercial and public sector organizations, will benefit from faster content delivery and enhanced security,” said Amrote Abdella, general manager, AWS Sub-Saharan Africa. “Companies looking to modernize their operations will find an easier on-ramp to the cloud through the new Amazon CloudFront edge location. Recognizing Nigeria’s role as a leading technology hub in Africa, we continue to invest in the country to meet our customers’ growing needs and help them accelerate their digital transformations.”
The launch of local AWS infrastructure in Nigeria will help organizations in various industries, including education, media and entertainment, healthcare, financial services, and e-commerce, innovate faster.
IbakaTV is a Nigerian video-on-demand platform for Nollywood movies, with over 15,000 hours of movie and TV content available for streaming.
“IbakaTV’s mission is to make quality Nollywood content accessible to viewers wherever they may be, on whichever platform they chose to view it,” said Idornigie Blessed, CEO at Ibaka Entertainment. “We look forward to AWS extending its global network footprint into Nigeria with the new Amazon CloudFront edge location, which we expect will help us enable an enhanced entertainment experience for millions of our customers in the region.”
The new Amazon CloudFront edge location is the latest in AWS’s ongoing investments in Africa.
In 2004, AWS launched a Development Center in Cape Town focused on pioneering networking technologies, next-generation software for customer support, and Amazon EC2.
Since 2015, AWS has opened offices in Johannesburg and Nigeria (2022). In 2017, AWS Direct Connect, a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from on-premises to AWS, expanded to Africa with locations in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
In 2018, Amazon CloudFront edge locations launched in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa, followed by an edge location in Nairobi, Kenya (2020).
The AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region launched in 2020 with three Availability Zones. In January 2023, the first AWS Local Zones location launched in Lagos, helping deliver distributed edge and hybrid cloud applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users in Nigeria.
