AWS increases edge capabilities with CloudFront and AWS Direct Connect locations

Amazon Web Services (AWS) 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.

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.

Navdeep Manaktala, Head of Business Development, Amazon Internet Services Private Limited, says, “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. 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."

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.