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Arabian, sorry, Amazon Web Services to land in Bahrain and UAE

Full region coming in 2019. Keeping it cold should be fun!

Amazon Web Services has announced it will open bit barns in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The company says it's done so to give its customers and partners a new place to run code and store data. The Gulf of Arabia, home to both Bahrain and the UAE, is well-served by submarine cables that could offer overland connections to Saudi Arabia, which would otherwise have to run connections in from the Red Sea. The Gulf states are also a mere hop-skip-and-jump from from India, where cloud services are growing at speed and a low-latency backup won't be unwelcome.

The Register suspects those factors are more interesting to AWS than the local user populations, which are not colossal.

Bahrain will get a full AWS region, with three availability zones offering a comprehensive collection of cloud services, by early 2019. The UAE will host a mere edge location as of early 2018, with only Amazon CloudFront, Route 53, Shield, and WAF on tap.

The new installations face some interesting challenges, one of them being the region's fierce heat. The Register also wonders what might happen if an Israeli company decides to locate some data in either new location, as neither the UAE or Bahrain recognises Israel's existence.

Co-incidentally, the announcement of the new middle east region came on the same day that Saudi Arabia announced it would permit women to drive. ®

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