Amazon Web Services establishes cloud infrastructure in Israel

Online retail giant announced that Tel Aviv is to become the third Middle East location to join its new CloudFront "Edge" infrastructure.

By EYTAN HALON
The logo of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seen during the 4th annual America Digital Latin American Congress of Business and Technology in Santiago (photo credit: IVAN ALVARADO/REUTERS)
The logo of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seen during the 4th annual America Digital Latin American Congress of Business and Technology in Santiago
(photo credit: IVAN ALVARADO/REUTERS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud platform of e-commerce giant Amazon, will establish cloud infrastructure in Israel for the first time, the company announced on Wednesday.
Promising accelerated performance for local users, AWS will operate a new CloudFront “Edge” location in Tel Aviv and join a globally-distributed fast content delivery network (CDN) with 188 Points of Presence (PoPs), or Edges, in 70 cities across 31 countries.
The CloudFront network enables businesses and developers to securely distribute content to consumers worldwide with high data transfer speeds.
The company says the cloud data infrastructure established in Tel Aviv will enable the delivery of content to local AWS users with up to 75% quicker speeds, with Israeli customers previously relying on Edge locations spread across Europe. Gett, Viber, Kenshoo, JFrog and IronSource are some of the major Israeli companies already using CloudFront.
The Tel Aviv Edge location is also the third PoP established by Amazon in the Middle East, after AWS established similar infrastructure in Dubai and Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. CloudFront charges, Amazon said, will be according to its European price classes.
According to analyst firm Canalys, AWS captured 31.7% of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market share in 2018 and invested a total of $25.4 billion on infrastructure. Microsoft's Azure cloud service and Google Cloud captured 16.8% and 8.5% of the market, respectively.
Since first establishing operations in Israel in 2014, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing business has invested significantly in the local market.
In July, Amazon acquired Israeli flash storage start-up E8 Storage, with Amazon reportedly intending to merge its team and technology with AWS’s Tel Aviv-based development center.
AWS also acquired cloud computing start-up CloudEndure for an estimated $200m.-$250m. in January 2019, boosting Amazon’s cloud-based business IT resilience solutions. In 2015, Amazon acquired chip maker Annapurna Labs for a reported $350m.-$375m., in a deal since hailed as a critical contributor toward AWS’s success in the hardware market.