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Amazon Web Services has added a new cloud computing region in Mumbai, India — its first in the country — to better serve the tens of thousands of Indian customers that until now have had to connect outside their country in order to use its popular cloud services.

Roughly 75,000 Indian customers are already remotely using AWS regions outside that country — some have been doing so for many years — or are using the Mumbai region on a trial basis, AWS said.  “Most Indian startups (are) building their entire businesses on AWS,”  said AWS CEO Andy Jassy in a release. Now, with their own, local region, Indian businesses gain lower latency and the reassurance of keeping their data closer by, AWS said.

The Mumbai region brings to six AWS’s total number of regions in the Asia Pacific area, and its worldwide total to 13, the company said.  Each AWS region is isolated from the others. The new region has two availability zones, defined as separate, independent data centers, each with its own power, cooling and security, connected to each other by a high-speed network.

AWS committed to the new cloud region almost exactly a year ago. It has opened six offices in India since 2011 — in Bengalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune. It also maintains “points of presence” in Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai, from which it offers CloudFront, a service it said accelerates delivery of websites and video content, and Route 53, a domain-name service. In total, AWS offers 55 such points of presence, which it also calls edge locations, worldwide.

The Mumbai region supports Elastic Compute Cloud in the C4, D2, I2, M4, R3 and T2 instances; Elastic Block Store, Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing and 30 other services, including the Aurora and DynamoDB database management systems and the Redshift data warehouse.

Ankit Bhati, co-founder and CTO of Indian taxicab aggregator Ola, in the release called the new local region “world-class.” Other Indian companies already using AWS include the nation’s largest car maker, Tata Motors Ltd.; matchmaking service Shaadi.com; and media company Novi Digital, a subsidiary of STAR India.

AWS didn’t say how many independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) have joined its partner network in India, helping organizations move to and use AWS. But it said that number has grown more than 80 percent in the past year.

Earlier this month, Amazon pledged to invest $3 billion in India, with some of that money going toward making the country Amazon’s largest engineering and development center outside the U.S.

Cloud competitor IBM in late 2015 said it had opened its second Indian cloud data center, in Chennai. It announced its first center there, in Mumbai, in October 2014. Microsoft in September 2015 announced it had three Azure centers operating in India — in Chennai, Mumbai and Pune, Information Week reported.

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