Amazon Web Services Launches New Edge Locations in India for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53

MUMBAI and SEATTLE, July 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

New Locations in India Increase Performance and Lower Latency for Content Delivery to End Users

(NASDAQ: AMZN) - Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS, Inc.), an Amazon.com company, today announced the launch of two Amazon CloudFront edge locations in India. Located in Chennai and Mumbai, the newly launched points-of-presence join a global network of 42 edge locations worldwide that the Amazon CloudFront service uses to deliver content to end users with low latency and high data transfer speeds. The new edge locations also support Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ and to learn more about Amazon Route 53, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/route53

New Edge Locations for Amazon CloudFront Further Speed Content Delivery Across the World

With two more edge locations added to AWS's global content distribution network, Amazon CloudFront provides the following benefits to customers and their end users:

• Fast - Allows the delivery of an entire website (including dynamic, static and streaming content) as well as images, videos, media files and downloadable software with high performance and low latency to end users around the globe.
• Global - By using the network of Amazon CloudFront edge locations around the world to automate the routing of content requests, organizations improve their proximity to users, speed performance and increase user satisfaction. 
• Cost-Effective - No required minimum commitments or upfront fees, enabling customers to pay only for the content delivered through the global network of Amazon CloudFront edge locations. 
• Simple - Customers can use the AWS Management Console or a single API call to get started distributing content from an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or other origin. For existing users of Amazon CloudFront, content will automatically route to the new India locations when needed.
• Elastic - Eliminates the need to overprovision expensive web-server capacity to support unpredictable traffic peaks. Amazon CloudFront automatically responds as demand increases or decreases, ensuring a seamless, uninterrupted user experience.

"Organizations in India need the flexibility to rapidly scale IT infrastructure as they grow without spending precious capital on hardware or getting locked into a long term contract with a co-location facility," said Shane Owenby, Amazon Web Services Managing Director of Asia Pacific. "Using AWS has removed the constraint related to infrastructure resources and has enabled many of our customers, ranging from start-ups to enterprises to unleash their ideas, innovate fast and build new businesses quickly. With 9 AWS Regions and 42 Amazon CloudFront edge locations around the world, our customers are able to expand globally virtually overnight while delivering great local user experience for their services."

Indian Customers Drive Business Agility and Cost Savings with AWS 

In the second quarter of 2013, more than 8,000 customers in India have turned to the AWS cloud to run a variety of IT operations more efficiently and at lower costs than with traditional, on-premises data centers. Popular AWS workloads for customers in India include website hosting, big data analytics, social games, mobile applications, e-commerce platforms, mission critical business applications such as SAP and Microsoft Sharepoint, and start-ups launching altogether new businesses on top of AWS. Among the 8,000 customers in India already using AWS to save money and move more quickly include the following:

Eros International Media Ltd., a Mumbai-based Indian motion picture production and distribution company, turned to AWS to support content conversion and storage for the world's leading web-based, streaming video service for Indian Movies - ErosNow.com. "AWS eliminated the technology constraints in processing content and allowed us to focus on developing the ErosNow service instead of building the technology infrastructure. This has enabled us to launch the largest, full length high-definition Hindi movie streaming service in an amazingly short time of less than a year and at a global scale," said Pawan Gupta, Chief Technology Officer of Eros International. "Amazon CloudFront helps us to stream our video content worldwide, and we expect these two new edge locations in Chennai and Mumbai to undoubtedly further enhance viewers' experience in India." 

MPS, a publishing services company in India, turned to the AWS as the foundation of their cloud strategy moving forward. So far, MPS has migrated 67 websites from their existing hosting provider to AWS, with estimated savings of more than U.S. $150,000 per year in both capital and operating expenses. "Using AWS services, our IT team no longer needs to be involved in the procurement, installation, testing and maintenance of hardware infrastructure. The huge savings in time and costs have enabled us to focus more constructively in driving new revenue-generating initiatives for our company," said Arun Goyal, Senior Vice President and Head of IT, MPS.

Playblazer is a Mumbai-based startup that was honored as a finalist in the Gaming Category at the AWS Global Start-Up Challenge 2012. "AWS cloud made the innovation necessary for gaming services like Playblazer possible. We set out to solve a very expensive, iterative and time-consuming development problem for makers of social and multiplayer games. Our cloud-hosted, multi-tenant and auto-scaling platform enables game studios to rapidly build and deploy the common server-side functionality required for online gaming," said Nikhil Soman, Founder & CEO, Playblazer. "Playblazer extends the core values of AWS to the game development industry by reducing the cost of infrastructure, as well as time-to-market often from months of effort to just a few hours. This allows game developers to focus on their creative and design challenges rather than on building infrastructure, helping them to thrive in the hyper-competitive and unpredictable online application store economies."

Vserv.mobi is a Mumbai-based Global Mobile Ad Network for app developers, publishers, advertisers and telecom providers. The company has delivered mobile advertising for leading Fortune 500 brands and digital media companies in over 150 countries, serving 21 billion mobile ad requests per month. "We chose AWS not only because they are a pioneer and a leader in the cloud computing space, but more importantly because the AWS team works cooperatively with the developer community, listens to customer feedback and makes continuous enhancements," said Ashay Padwal, CTO and Co-Founder of Vserv.mobi. "We are using almost all of the AWS Regions worldwide to expand the reach of our advertising network, enabling a start-up like us to establish a global business. It would have been a daunting and costly task for us to build and maintain our network without AWS Cloud, especially considering the virtually limitless scale and rapid pace of innovation that AWS also provides."

ZOVI, based in Bangalore and Guragaon, designs and manufactures apparel as well as accessories for men, women and children which are sold primarily through the internet. Using AWS has helped ZOVI to eliminate an estimated U.S. $ 1 million in initial capital expenditures for hardware as well as save an additional U.S. $200,000 annually in operating expenses. Moreover, the company can scale to several hundreds of thousands of visitors per day with AWS services in a matter of minutes without staff intervention, saving months of development time. "In the e-commerce business, web-store responsiveness and high availability are as critical as apparel selection and pricing for providing an outstanding experience that keeps customers coming back," said Satish Mani, CTO, Engineering Leadership. "The new Amazon CloudFront edge locations in India enable us to continue to enhance the shopping experience for our growing customer base as we take our business to next level."

Living Media (India Today Group), based in New Delhi, is an Indian media conglomerate with interests in magazines, newspapers, books, radio, television, printing services and the Internet. Using AWS has helped India Today Group Digital (ITGD) significantly reduce the time it takes to provision IT resources from weeks to now often within minutes, and scale seamlessly to support the unpredictable traffic of live news sites. "Video delivery has become the differentiator for live news sites. Since moving our video workloads to AWS platform, the video traffic has grown exponentially," says Sanjay Nagpal, Head - Technology Infrastructure, India Today Group Digital. "Using Amazon CloudFront has already provided great video viewing experience for our users. We expect that the new Amazon CloudFront edge locations in India will enable us to provide an even more superior customer experience."

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services, Inc. began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. Amazon Web Services offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle Paperwhite is the most-advanced e-reader ever constructed with 62% more pixels and 25% increased contrast, a patented built-in front light for reading in all lighting conditions, extra-long battery life, and a thin and light design. The new latest generation Kindle, the lightest and smallest Kindle, now features new, improved fonts and faster page turns. Kindle Fire HD features a stunning custom high-definition display, exclusive Dolby audio with dual stereo speakers, high-end, laptop-grade Wi-Fi with dual-band support, dual-antennas and MIMO for faster streaming and downloads, enough storage for HD content, and the latest generation processor and graphics engine-and it is available in two display sizes-7" and 8.9". The large-screen Kindle Fire HD is also available with 4G wireless, and comes with a groundbreaking $49.99 introductory 4G LTE data package. The all-new Kindle Fire features a 20% faster processor, 40% faster performance, twice the memory, and longer battery life.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, www.amazon.es, www.amazon.com.br and www.amazon.in. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment and data center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Primary Media Contact: Regina Tan, [email protected], [email protected]