After ten years of service in SA, Amazon is launching an office in Johannesburg to compliment its CapeTown development centre branch. The office will employ 250 skilled engineers and will focus on AWS (Amazon Web Service) and customer-focused services, so don’t bank on any drone drop-offs just yet.

Interestingly, South African businesses were among the first to adopt Amazon’s hosting services in 2006. Amazon’s EC2 service has shown a year on year growth of close to 100% and includes many prominent names such as Netflix, Spotify, DropBox, Tinder, Adobe, Standard beep Bank, Nintendo and even NASA.

Amazon’s services are renowned for speed, flexibility, rapid scaling and charging slightly more than everyone else for a bouquet of services and acronyms most people don’t understand. Beyond this minor barrier to entry, Amazon clients can completely customise their host parameters with just a few clicks and dollars. CPU slacking of at 20% but your site is lagging? Shutdown your slice, add some RAM and turn it back on. Bam.

There’s so much more to Amazon’s services, dauntingly so, but if you host anything more complicated than a blog or single page kitten mill, Amazon’s got your back…duplicated across the planet. On SSDs.

Grab the technical track if you missed the launch or are suffering from insomnia at http://aws.amazon.com/south-africa/