AWS adds two new Edge locations for Amazon CloudFront and AWS Direct Connect locations in Hyderabad and New Delhi

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, is continuing to invest in India by adding new Edge locations in the country. AWS has added two new Edge locations for Amazon CloudFront and AWS Direct Connect locations, in Hyderabad and New Delhi. This expands the total Amazon CloudFront locations in India to 11 Points of Presence across Mumbai (three), New Delhi (three), Chennai (two), Hyderabad (two), and Bengaluru (one). Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of 166 Points of Presence (including 155 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 65 cities across 29 countries.

The new Amazon CloudFront locations double Amazon’s content delivery network (CDN) capacity in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region by enabling more ISP peering, increased processing of viewer requests, and the ability to cache content locally. The new locations provide low latency and high data transfer rates to AWS customers who will be able to deliver dynamic and static web content to end users, while providing the full suite of benefits of Amazon CloudFront that include deep integration with compute, and security services and features, such as Lambda@Edge, AWS Shield, and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).

AWS Direct Connect makes it easy for customers to establish a dedicated network connection from their data centers to AWS Cloud, reducing their network costs, increasing bandwidth throughput, and providing a more consistent network experience when compared to Internet-based connectivity. Connections are made to a particular Direct Connect location, and can run at either 1 or 10 Gbps (billions of bits per second), or through an Amazon Partner Network (APN) Partner to connect at speeds less than 1 Gbps. With AWS Direct Connect, customers can connect to all their AWS resources in any global AWS Region and transfer their mission-critical data directly between their data centers and AWS Cloud. AWS Direct Connect in Delhi and Hyderabad can be accessed through APN Partner ST Telemedia.

“Our investment in growing the Amazon CloudFront and AWS Direct Connect footprint in India is a result of the strong customer momentum we are seeing for content delivery services,” said Navdeep Manaktala, Head of Business Development, Amazon Internet Services Private Limited. “Amazon CloudFront securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, and AWS Direct Connect helps customers establish a dedicated network connection to AWS Cloud; and our intent is to make this easier for customers across the country. We’ll continue to invest in expanding AWS infrastructure across the country to meet the growing needs of our customers and accelerate their cloud adoption journey.”

Amazon CloudFront continuously measures internet connectivity, performance, and throughput to find the best way to route requests to the AWS network. Amazon CloudFront is also running on the AWS global network backbone, which allows for efficient transmission of requests between the Amazon CloudFront locations and other AWS services, across regions and applications. Developers and businesses can distribute content via a self-service, pay-as-you-go web service for accelerated content delivery at high data transfer speeds.

The service works seamlessly on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), where users store the original versions of objects delivered through the service. The service caches copies of content close to end users for low latency delivery, while also providing fast, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver popular objects to end users at scale.

Customers across diverse industries experience the benefits of the instant scalability with no minimum usage commitment or long-term contracts. Amazon CloudFront enables use cases such as video distribution, software downloads, music downloads, and delivering frequently accessed website images and objects seamlessly.

“ST Telemedia is an active investor in growth opportunities emerging from the digital convergence of users, communities, content, and services,” said Vipin Shirsat, Vice President – Sales and Marketing, ST Telemedia. “With decades of experience in building and operating communications, media, and telecom businesses across the globe, we have a proven approach – backed by deep industry expertise and knowledge – to help our customers grow and succeed. These new AWS Direct Connect locations accelerate Indian enterprises and businesses in their move to AWS Cloud by allowing them to seamlessly and directly connect their network infrastructure through secure and reliable private connectivity. With more customers looking at the security and latency challenges within their network backbone, this is a welcome option.”

PowerSportz, which launched in May 2018, has already become one of India’s most watched digital sports channels on the Internet with an average of 1 million video views per day. Launched as the first free-to-air 24/7 live sports channel over a digital platform, PowerSportz offers original content and streams sports programming to viewers directly by using a unique live and on-demand video service across over-the-air devices. “AWS Cloud was our choice when we launched PowerSportz,” said Kanthi D Suresh, Editor-in-Chief, PowerSportz, “We were looking for a customized solution and innovative pricing which AWS provided us with immediately. We are now gearing up for more traffic to hit the channel, and Amazon CloudFront allows us to provide uninterrupted viewer experience even during our biggest and most-watched events.”

Kitsune is a full-stack application development framework from NowFloats that compiles application logic to serverless architecture components on the cloud within minutes. The platform processes approximately 500 million requests per month. “Kitsune simplifies serverless application development on the cloud,” said Ronak Samantray, Founder, NowFloats. “Amazon CloudFront is the first layer for incoming requests when deploying an event-driven, serverless computing platform like AWS Lambda, and with more Amazon CloudFront Edge locations, our customers will experience faster service delivery for their applications. When we saw the price of Amazon CloudFront combined with the spectrum of functionality it offers, it was easy to lean on AWS to help us enable Amazon CloudFront as the default content delivery network for our customers.”

Cloud Kinetics is a Premier AWS Consulting Partner and AWS Managed Service Provider, serving some of the largest media organizations in India, as well as large enterprises, with digital asset management, providing proprietary integrated media delivery and cloud asset management platforms. “As a ‘born-in-the-cloud’ company, we have used AWS to provide integrated development platforms and services for Indian customers since 2012,” said Karthik Santhanam, Founder & CTO of Cloud Kinetics. “With the rapid increase in digital news and entertainment content channels and the rising consumer base in Southern India, our customers expect near real-time, low-latency, and high quality digital content delivery. Amazon CloudFront provides that and is a real answer to meet our customers’ need to scale their growing digital content services in the country.”