AWS announces new Wavelength Zones in Morocco and Senegal

Today, AWS and Orange Middle East & Africa announced plans to bring AWS Wavelength to Morocco and Senegal later this year. In addition to the first AWS Wavelength Zones in Africa, this announcement will mark the first Wavelength Zones in countries without an existing AWS Region or AWS Local Zone. This will enable AWS customers to support use cases across regulated industries that require data to remain local, such as telecom, finance, public sector, and healthcare, as well as industries that depend on low-latency applications like gaming.

To meet the end-customer needs for low latency and data residency in the growing geographies of Morocco and Senegal, we looked for a CSP partner with global reach, breadth, a depth of connectivity offerings and an ambition to scale their solution offerings to include a unique cloud value proposition. With 26 operating countries and over 298 million worldwide customers, including 18 in Africa and the Middle East, we knew that Orange’s strong presence and expertise in these markets would uniquely benefit our AWS customers across regulated industries and industries that require low-latency for applications.

Since our announcement of AWS Wavelength Zones in November 2019, we have been working backwards from customer needs to provide a truly consistent and secure experience to build and run applications across the continuum of environments where customers operate—from the cloud to large metro areas, mobile networks, on-premises locations, and to mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Communications Service Providers (CSPs) such as Bell Canada, BT, KDDI, SK Telecom, Verizon, and Vodafone saw the opportunity to collaborate with AWS to harness the cloud to accelerate the development of enterprise industry solutions and develop new use cases to address customers’ pressing needs for latency, security, and data residency.

Across our Hybrid Cloud and Edge portfolio, the consistent AWS experience has been one of the most frequent pieces of feedback from our customers. From a single Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) control plane, customers can seamlessly launch node groups across AWS Outposts, AWS Wavelength, and AWS Local Zones – all at once, with no incremental management overhead. Beyond consistency, our customers continue to reiterate the value these services can provide to address data residency requirements. Customers are using AWS Control Tower landing zone and AWS Organizations custom guardrails to enable compliance with data residency requirements across AWS Hybrid Cloud and Edge services.

Figure 1: Wavelength Architecture Overview

Our new Wavelength Zones in collaboration with Orange will support Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types such as gp2. You can also access Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon EMR and Application Load Balancer (ALB) to support a broad set of workloads.

Architecture overview

With AWS Wavelength, customers can take advantage of the cloud’s on-demand scaling and pay-as-you-go pricing model, enabling them to keep their data localized while benefiting from the same reliable, secure, and high-performance infrastructure as AWS Regions. Customers can expect operational consistency, access to the same services and APIs, and the ability to use familiar tools for automation, deployments, and security controls.

Let’s break down some of the architectural fundamentals of AWS Wavelength Zones:

Figure 2: Wavelength Detailed Architecture

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Wavelength Zones extend existing or net-new VPCs to these localized in-country edge zones. For regulated workloads, customers can also create isolated VPCs for the single Wavelength Zone.

Wavelength Zone subnets: Just like an AWS Region, customers can create subnets within an AWS Wavelength Zone and associate route tables and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs).

Carrier Gateway: For select AWS Wavelength subnets that require internet access, customers can associate route tables with default routes through the Carrier Gateway. The Carrier Gateway is AWS-managed and highly-available by design, supporting the network address translation (NAT) of Private IPs within the customer VPC to Carrier IPs.

Carrier IP: To expose Amazon EC2 instances and other resources to internet, customers must attach Carrier IP addresses to those resources (much like Public IPs in the region).

Announcing Internet Ingress Support for Wavelength Zones: Traditionally, internet egress and carrier ingress to Wavelength Zones were supported via Carrier Gateways. A carrier gateway allowed inbound traffic from a carrier network in a specific location, and it allowed outbound traffic to the carrier network and the internet. In these Wavelength Zones, we are excited to announce that internet ingress will be supported through the Carrier Gateway. This capability further enhances the flexibility and accessibility of Wavelength, allowing customers to leverage the benefits of edge computing while ensuring seamless connectivity with local internet services.

Architecting local, on-demand cloud applications

Telco-Grade Gaming Technology

Here is a glimpse into some of our customers looking to deploy workloads to these new AWS Wavelength Zones: Swarmio is a telco-grade gaming technology provider that offers unparalleled solutions that elevate the gaming experience and drive revenue for both telcos and game publishers.

“There is a dynamic and growing gamer community in Africa, including Morocco and Senegal, and we want to provide them with advanced gaming experiences but run into technical hurdles involving locally available cloud services,” said Vijai Karthigesu, CEO and Founder of Swarmio. “AWS Wavelength will help us transform the worldwide gaming landscape by combining the power of AWS with our Swarmio Edge platform to provide an unmatched, low-latency experience that allows creators to connect and delights global game publishers and developers.”

Reference Architecture for Safeguarding Online Payments

A recent study of online payments fraud from Juniper Research forecasts global losses to grow from $38B in 2023 to $91B in 2028, threatening the growth and trust in digital transactions. Financial services and retail customers are looking for innovative solutions to safeguard payments on behalf of businesses and consumers alike. By combining state-of-the-art technologies with a deep understanding of the regional landscape, AWS Wavelength empowers local merchants and financial institutions to achieve requirements such as data residency or reduced latency. The below architecture is an example of how customers can extend their Amazon EKS footprint to AWS Wavelength Zones through self-managed node groups and deploy S3-compatible object storage along with relational database such as PostgreSQL through open-source projects or partner solutions available on AWS Marketplace.

Figure 3: Real-time fraud analysis architecture on Wavelength

Using this architecture, customers benefit from real-time data analysis, behavioral patterns, and innovative algorithms to identify suspicious activities and mitigate risks effectively. To learn more and access the full implementation details, visit GitHub.

Get started

By extending AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to localized in-country infrastructure, AWS Wavelength allows customers to process and store their data locally while leveraging the scalability and security of the AWS Cloud to drive innovation. Customers can seamlessly integrate their applications and workloads with the edge, benefiting from a truly consistent hybrid experience.

The AWS Wavelength Zones in Morocco and Senegal will open later this year. Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog so that you will be among the first to know when the new AWS Wavelength Zones are open! Additionally, you can get in touch with AWS Wavelength experts to learn more and share your use case.

To learn more about AWS Wavelength, visit the docs, our AWS Wavelength Bootcamp or the Global Infrastructure page.