AWS Plans Second Cloud Region in India, Targeting Hyderabad

An approximately $7.8 billion AWS investment will be the Indian state of Telangana’s largest foreign direct investment, according to K. T. Rama Rao, Telangana’s minister for municipal administration and urban development, industry and commerce, and information technology.

Amazon Web Services will open a second cloud infrastructure region in India, this time in the state of Telangana, where the capital city of Hyderabad is a technology center for the country.

The Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region will provide AWS customers with even lower latency across southern India, the cloud provider said. The region is targeted to open in mid-2022 with three availability zones or data center clusters.

K. T. Rama Rao, Telangana‘s minister for municipal administration and urban development, industry and commerce and information technology, in a tweet today said AWS’ investment in the Telangana data centers would total approximately $7.8 billion and would be the largest foreign direct investment in the state. An AWS spokesperson declined to confirm the figure.

Hyderabad is a major tech center and home to many multinational IT companies and the Hyderabad Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy City (HITEC City) an IT, engineering, health informatics, bioinformatics and financial business district. AWS opened its largest campus building globally in Hyderabad in August of 2019, a 9.5-acre campus that can support more than 15,000 employees.

“Hyderabad is an important talent hub for IT professionals and entrepreneurs, and with the increased adoption of cloud computing, we are set to see a transformation in the way businesses in south India harness the power of IT,” Rama Rao said in a statement. “Combining the unique resources of Telangana with AWS, the world’s leading cloud, will boost economic development, power digital-led innovation and establish a cloud center hub for the rest of the country.”

AWS opened its first office in India in 2011 and now has offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai and Coimbatore that support a customer base that includes enterprises, independent software vendors, consulting partners, digital-native businesses, government agencies, academic institutions, small and mid-size companies, startups and developers.

“In a country that is synonymous with innovation at scale, our India customers continue to develop remarkable solutions that span multiple industries and use cases, creating new employment and economic opportunities, and bringing new life to existing ones,” AWS “chief evangelist” Jeff Barr said in a blog post. “Online marketplaces and e-commerce, mobile gaming platforms that can quickly scale, born-in-the-cloud airlines, and many more -- all making use of multiple AWS services and designed to serve both domestic and global markets.”

AWS opened its first cloud region in India – the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region – in June of 2016 and expanded it three years later by adding a third availability zone.

AWS also has 17 CloudFront edge locations in India to deliver content to end users with lower latency -- four each in Hyderabad and New Delhi, three each in Bengaluru and Mumbai, two in Chennai and one in Kolkata. The edge locations work in concert with a CloudFront regional edge cache in Mumbai to speed delivery of content, according to Barr. The cloud provider also has six AWS Direct Connect locations that connect to its Asia Pacific (Mumbai) cloud region: two in Mumbai and one each in Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bengaluru. AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service solution designed to make it easier to establish a dedicated network connection from an organization’s on premises environment to AWS.

The second cloud region in India will help AWS Partner Network (APN) members and customers meet the country’s data localization mandates.

It would give customer National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange e-Markets Limited (NeML) “greater options to build in redundancy, real-time availability and security for our applications and data,” according to Ravindra Shevade, chief operations officer for NeML, a national exchange in India that offers web-based platforms for commodities trading.

Another AWS customer, Indian asset management company DSP Investment Managers (DSPIM) said reduced operational overhead, digital transformation and the adoption of a data-driven culture were the immediate benefits of migrating 50-plus workloads to the AWS cloud since 2019.

“Our investor transaction platform built on AWS now allows us to reimagine our investors’ digital experience,” DSPIM chief technology officer Ashish Bajaj said in a statement. “A second AWS Region in India allows us to satisfy regulatory requirements and further improve our availability and resiliency.”

APN independent software vendors and systems integrators working in India include Accenture, BlazeClan, BluePi, Capillary, Cloud Kinetics, Deloitte, Freshworks, Hostin, Manthan, Minfy Technologies, Powerupcloud, Progressive Infotech, Redington and Umbrella Infocare.

BlazeClan, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner focused on the financial services industry, has managed 120-plus large migrations in Asia-Pacific.

“AWS has always believed in a long-term mindset, which is a crucial component for our customers as they embark deeper within their digital transformation initiatives,” BlazeClan founder and CEO Varoon Rajani said in a statement. “The second region in India will help our customers in regulated industries such as banking and financial services move ahead with confidence in their cloud migration journeys.”

Vijay Jain, founder of Minfy Technologies, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner focused on SAP, said a second AWS cloud region in India would further benefit its enterprise resource planning customers that want to run their critical workloads on a cost-effective and secure platform.

AWS rival Microsoft has three cloud regions in central, south and west India that opened in 2015 and are located in Pune, Chennai and Mumbai, respectively. Google Cloud has a Mumbai region with plans for another in Delhi.

In total, AWS has 24 cloud regions with 77 availability zones, with plans for four additional regions in Indonesia, Japan, Spain and Switzerland in addition to the slated Hyderabad region. Other AWS cloud regions in Asia-Pacific are located in Australia, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Singapore.