Amazon CloudFront Announces New Edge Locations in the United Arab Emirates

Amazon CloudFront is excited to formally announce the launch of two new Edge locations in the United Arab Emirates: Dubai and Fujairah. The launch of these two Edge locations helps extend the benefits of AWS services closer to your end viewers. CloudFront’s integration with other AWS services like Amazon S3, EC2, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and AWS Certificate Manager provide you with a wide array of security and content delivery options, all with a low-cost, pay-as-you-go pricing model. Best of all, your viewers will enjoy a lower-latency experience with your web and mobile applications. With the introduction of Dubai and Fujairah, average latency within the United Arab Emirates has been reduced by as much as 90%. We’re continuing to connect with more internet service providers for broader regional latency reductions.

Amazon CloudFront’s global network now includes 138 points of presence (including 127 Edge locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 63 cities across 29 countries, and continues to grow. AWS Direct Connect has recently announced expansions within the United Arab Emirates, and AWS itself has pre-announced a Middle East Region coming to Bahrain in 2019.

“We are thrilled to continue expanding our presence in the Middle East and to be bringing even more advanced cloud technologies to customers in the United Arab Emirates,” said Andy Isherwood, AWS Vice President and Managing Director EMEA. “The Middle East is an important region for AWS and the United Arab Emirates is a key hub for many of the Middle East’s most innovative startups and enterprises. We look forward to further supporting these organizations with our new Edge location infrastructure as they accelerate their cloud adoption.”

In response to these announcements, we’ve heard from many customers about the positive impact the expansions have had on their viewer experiences and applications’ performance.

Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC Group) is the largest media company in the Middle East, delivering premium content to over 150 million people across the Middle East and North Africa. Adriaan Bloem, Senior Manager Online Platforms, MBC Group shared, “We have been using AWS extensively for our digital properties including SHAHID.net, MBC.net, and GOBOZ, MBC’s Video on Demand service for kids. With the availability of these local Amazon CloudFront locations, we acquire better ways to manage our costs and gain a tremendous amount of flexibility – thus being able to offer an even better experience for our end users.”

Anghami is a top music platform in the Middle East and North Africa region. Anghami has over 50 million users and offers instant access to more than 26 million songs. Elie Habib, co-founder and CTO at Anghami said, “We are very excited by the opportunities that the new AWS Edge locations will bring to our service, particularly being able to cope with dramatic peaks in traffic. For example, we see peaks of usage at night, in the morning, and especially when new music is released, which can mean a 300 percent increase in traffic. Having a local Edge location allows us to better cope with these fluctuations. Not having to worry about latency issues or data transfer speeds because Amazon CloudFront is delivering our performance needs frees us up to innovate new ways for users to interact with the app, from anywhere in the world.”

Dubizzle is the leading online classifieds service in the Middle East. Barry Judge, General Manager at Dubizzle stated, “We have been using AWS for many years because of the speed and agility that it provides for us, and we are thrilled to see them bring more infrastructure closer to us. We are constantly releasing new application features and to be able to do that at increased speed is critical for our business and for the user experience. More importantly, security is central to everything we do and with the local AWS Edge location, we are able to improve the way we deliver our services. At the same time, we benefit from a wide array of security features that come with Amazon CloudFront, particularly AWS WAF. The embedded security features bring us peace of mind, and allow us to focus on how we can better serve our customers.”

To learn more about Amazon CloudFront visit our Getting Started page. You can also easily get started by working with a member of the Amazon CloudFront AWS Partner Network. Information about pricing for CloudFront, including pricing for the new Edge locations in the Middle East is found on our CloudFront Pricing Page.

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