The African leg of Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Global Summit 2017 gets underway in Cape Town tomorrow.

Amazon's on-demand cloud computing division has organised 30 Summits, with the only Africa edition to take place in the South African city.

The choice of Cape Town may come as no surprise to many as AWS CEO Andy Jassy expressed his pride in the Cape Town AWS team late last year from Las Vegas where he said the company is proud of the quality in the team and revealed that there are plans to continue to grow it.

In late 2016 AWS Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy complimented the Cape Town AWS team and revealed plans to grow the unit.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a key part of company's cloud-computing platform, was originated for South Africa in 2005. The Development Centre in Cape Town still plays a key role in developing and running the majority of Amazon EC2's core to date.

"It is true that EC2 was originally built by a team of about a dozen people in Cape Town and our Cape Town team has gotten much larger than that and they manage, build and run huge parts of EC2. That team has been fantastic. Really, there is no EC2 and there is no AWS without that team and we are really proud of the quality of that team that we have in Cape Town and we will continue to build it up," said Jassy to a team of journalists during the AWS Reinvent Conference held in Las Vegas in December 2016.

While Jassy is not expected to make an appearance in Cape Town tomorrow, many of the attendees will be looking to find out whether AWS has any plans to build a data centre in Africa.

Several presentations are scheduled, including from Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, and from Michael Needham,Senior Manager for Solution Architecture in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region.

AWS Cloud operates 43 availability zones within 16 geographic regions around the world. The company has announced plans for 11 more zones and four additional regions - although none of these are in Africa.

AWS opened an office in Johannesburg to support its customer base in South Africa. The office complements the Amazon Development Centre in Cape Town, which has been in operation since 2004.

Peter Rix, CTO of Absa, along with Chris Shortt, GM for Information Technology at Pick 'n Pay and David de Villiers, Chief Executive Officer of Zapper are listed to present customer testimonials during the Cape Town Summit – ahead of a four-and-a-half hour IOT hackathon.