AWS (Amazon Web Services) announced that the first AWS Region in the Middle East is now open and it is available for use today. The official name is Middle East (Bahrain) and the API name is me-south-1.
With today’s launch, the AWS Cloud now spans 69 Availability Zones within 22 geographic regions around the world.
The Middle East (Bahrain) Region consists of three Availability Zones (AZ’s). Having three Availability Zones enables Middle East organizations to meet business continuity and disaster recovery requirements and also build highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable applications.
Amazon reports that this is part of a continuing expansion and also announced plans to open nine additional availability zones in Indonesia, Italy and South Africa in coming years.
Applications running in this 3-AZ region can use C5, C5d, D2, I3, M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and T3 instances, and can make use of a long list of AWS services including Amazon API Gateway, Application Auto Scaling, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), AWS Artifact, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudFront, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch,CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Config Rules, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Dedicated Hosts, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Container Registry, Amazon ECS, Application Load Balancers (Classic, Network, and Application), Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Glacier, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS License Manager, AWS Marketplace, Amazon Neptune, AWS Organizations, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, AWS Resource Groups, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora, Amazon Route 53 (including Private DNS for VPCs), AWS Shield, AWS Server Migration Service, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Trusted Advisor, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, and VM Import/Export.
Amazon CloudFront edge locations are already operational in two cities in the Middle East (Dubai, and Fujairah, in the United Arab Emirates).
These cities also host existing AWS Direct Connect locations (Equinix DX1 in Dubai, and Etisalat Smart Hub datacenter in Fujairah). In addition , they are opening a new AWS Direct Connect location, AWS Bahrain DC53, in Manama, Bahrain. This new location is the first to be operated by AWS and features 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections. See the AWS Direct Connect website for details on locations, associated home regions, logical redundancy, and pricing.
