The Mayor of Cape Town, Patricia de Lille, has welcomed Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the city to host the Africa edition of the company's global summit schedule, incorporating 29 cities globally.

This is the second year consecutively that AWS, a provider of on-demand cloud computing platforms and Amazon.com subsidiary, has hosted the Africa event in Cape Town - which De Lille described as 'the digital city of Africa'.

"I would like to thank Amazon for selecting Cape Town for this conference...I would like to tell you that you are at the right place at the right time because you are in the digital city of Africa. That is why we are so proud to have you here. The reason why we say that is because we have got the most tech startups in the whole of the continent. Because of all the brave and young minds, Cape Town is shaping the future. We are also pleased to be hosting this event about the AWS ecosystem where customers can receive information on architecture, best practice and also new cloud services with various South African stakeholders."

De Lille added, "We overlay all our decision-making by asking if there is a technological solution that we can use because the world is changing on a daily basis. We are embracing these disruptive forces of technology and hosting the leading companies in innovation, such as yourselves, is vital for the city of Cape Town to make these priorities that we set for ourselves a reality."

De Lille says Cape Town has grown by more than 30% in the last ten years and will need to use technology to manage urbanisation. She says the City is spending R6.5 billion on infrastructure per year, 60% of which goes to new infrastructure and 40% on maintaining and repairing old infrastructure.

Proudly SA innovation

Michael Needham, Senior Manager Solutions Architecture at AWS for Russia Middle East Africa, reminded attendees of AWS' Cape Town link.

"Some of you may not know, but back in 2004 almost thirteen years ago there was small development team sitting on cardboard boxes and it was just about six of them in a small room down in an office park on the border of Wynburg and Constantia. They were deploying the first version of AWS EC2. Roll on forward EC2 carries some of the largest workloads across our millions of customers today so it is incredible to see the journey that has happened over those years. In some small part AWS is a proudly South African innovation."

1200 people are expected to attend the Cape Town event, which is nearly double the number that attended in 2016. The number of technical talks on the agenda has increased from 4 to 16.

It also emerged hours ahead of the event that one of the founders of Amazon EC2 Chris Pinkham has now joined JUMO's board and will be working with on technical and product strategy.

JUMO uses the cloud and behavioural data from mobile usage to give people in emerging markets financial identity. Five million of its customers are in six African countries.