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An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
- tnolet 8y agoThis is great news. I've had multiple customers request DC locations in South Africa for my monitoring service https://checklyhq.com https://checklyhq.com. Also in general a nice boost for the underserved ZA Saas market.
- lgleason 8y agoI feel bad for all of the local providers down there such as Afrihost, CloudAfrica etc.. Big companies pushing out the little guys sadly...
- okal 8y agoAlso possible that it'll just mean companies moving from eu-west to this new AZ...
- tnolet 8y agoYeah, well, it's not as if they couldn't see the total and utter consolidation of cloud and hosting infra coming a mile away. The question was never "if", just "when". Should not be a shock to the local players.
- stephengillie 8y agoHopefully they can compete on price. It's like having Google develop a product that competes with you, in that it adds legitimacy to your market. And AWS is known as a feature leader, not a value leader.
- numbsafari 8y agoThere are plenty of organizations that prefer not to host with the PaaS providers, and instead go with traditional hosting providers. Sometimes it co-lo, sometimes it’s for better price/performance for dedicated hosts, and sometimes it’s competitive. Like the others said, this will probably hurt in the short, but help in the long run for these businesses by lending legitimacy and growing the overall space through a significant capital investment.
- sitepodmatt 8y agoRackspace has done well becoming a VAR of AWS, winding down their own datacenters, and pushing their support angle
- nsomaru 8y agoNo thanks. I’m sick of high prices and backdated stacks. I host all my servers on DO, EU even for ZA customers. I wish this was a DO announcement. I’m a one man band and am loathe to invest the time to learn the whole AWS stack. Maybe lightsail will be included...
- Scarbutt 8y agoYou can use AWS as a simple DO but it will probably be more costly.
- grandinj 8y agoYay, finally decent latencies to/from SA customers when deploying AWS stuff The latency down here is a killer, often 300ms+ to EU/US, and for chatty web apps, a real pain.
- rootsudo 8y agoSame in SEA. Even though JP/SG/HK is next door. What about general telecom infrastructure in SA? Sure, you may have a local AWS DC, but, if everyone's on copper or mobile..
- grandinj 8y agoNot great, but it is getting better, peering points are being used more and more, and fibre is spreading (just got some in my neighbourhood) Of course, compared to touching anything across the atlantic, anything local is like lightning.
- CaptainJustin 8y agoInfrastructure isn't bad. Most of my friends have fibre. I have 100Mbps up / 100Mbps down. Latency to datacenters in SA varies: 1 to 20ms
- lnx01 8y agoBetter than it was 5-10 years ago - improving steadily. Fibre internet 40Mbps for about USD60pm - reliable, quick, low latency. Compared with the rubbish ADSL we've had to deal with in the past it's day and night.
- mikorym 8y agoThe 100 Mbps up and down mentioned is USD 85 per month at the current R 14.45 to the dollar in Johannesburg itself. However, outside the urban areas internet is slower and there is not fibre yet. Cellphone coverage is generally good. For some "inexplicable" reason, however, 1GB cellphone data has been stuck at R 149 for over 5 years now...
- zamalek 8y ago
- laichzeit0 8y agoBut only in 2020... Isn't Azure supposed to be up this year?
- tnolet 8y agoyeah, it's on their regions map https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/regions/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/regi...
- outworlder 8y agoYes. No availability zones though.
- boet 8y agoSA might not be the most stable place to setup shop with the white property theft laws just around the corner. I wonder if they will also not hire white people based on the reverse affirmative action laws of the communist government.
- andkenneth 8y agoProbably not at the top of everyones mind, but this will be great for gamers in SA. Lots of games-as-a-service (i.e. no dedicated server software you can run yourself) are hosted on AWS. Overwatch is a particular example that might now receive African servers off of this.
- mikorym 8y agoHow big is the gaming industry so far? My impression of the younger peer group is that it's pretty big.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoLast time I looked at it, it's the largest industry after the 'adult' industry.
- tills13 8y agoFornite makes $250m a month (by some reports) and is entirely hosted on AWS. That's one game.
- mikorym 8y agoMakes me feel old. Any game that even requires internet access makes me cringe. But it is nice to know that SA is keeping with trends. I attribute my slightly better English vocabulary to Diablo 2 and other games of that time.
- orf 8y ago> That's one game. The largest game, by a large margin.
- tills13 8y agoSure, but there are _hundreds_ of games.
- sitepodmatt 8y ago
- moltar 8y agoExciting times!
- improbable22 8y agoWorth mentioning perhaps that some stages in the invention of AWS happened there, at a safe distance from the mothership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...
- hacknat 8y agoMost of EC2 and S3 product development happened in South Africa. The original technical lead for AWS was South African, and was about to move back from Seattle after the original AWS pitch meeting. Bezos liked the idea so much that he let him develop the product in South Africa.
- mikorym 8y agoDid not know this—even though I knew Cape Town had a AWS team.
- donretag 8y agoSince then, most of AWS transitioned back to Seattle and the CT team focuses on some of the tooling around AWS. I interviewed with Amazon in CT and I regret not accepting the job offer. Seems like that office will really be picking up.
- ti_ranger 8y ago> Since then, most of AWS transitioned back to Seattle and the CT team focuses on some of the tooling around AWS. This is not true. Most of AWS was never in Cape Town, only most of EC2. And lots of EC2 development still occurs in Cape Town. EC2 has just grown immensely, so even though EC2 developers in Cape Town are now at least 25 times more than at launch, there are teams working on EC2-specific stuff in a number of locations (but yes, many in Seattle). However, all customer EC2 API calls (e.g. the AWS cli's 'aws ec2 run-instances' etc.) are handled by software that is currently developed and maintained by the Cape Town office, and I believe the EC2 parts of the AWS console are also mostly developed in Cape Town. There are however teams besides EC2 that have developers in Cape Town (e.g. I think the Personal Health Dashboard, which is not EC2-specific, is also developed in Cape Town). Cape Town also has a large team of support engineers in Premium Support, and handles all Premium Support calls for about 6 hours a day (IIRC).
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y agoIn terms of maximising the metric of "getting the servers closest to the maximum number of end-users with the longest current ping-times" then a region in Johannesburg seems to make more sense - it's a bigger metropolitan area than Cape Town, and is closer to points north of South Africa. However 1) Johannesburg is inland, the internet backbone cables land at the coast e.g. at Cape Town. ( https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ - Cape Town is at the South-West-most point where all those cables come in ) 2) AWS already has an operation in Cape Town.
- throwaway34re3 8y ago3) Johannesburg is one of the largest murder/crime zones in the country, whereas Cape Town is one of the last areas remaining in the country that has a low murder/crime rate.
- mikorym 8y ago- Cape Town murder rates are higher than JHB (attributed partly to Cape Flats vs. Soweto, the latter which is a much better place to live now). - JHB theft rates I think are higher than Cape Town. There are some statistics about this, but generally they show that CT is worse than some people think and JHB slightly better than people think. At least, from your comment, we can infer that some people seem to have the CT-is-good-vs-JHB-is-bad impression. Personally, I prefer not to flash about statistics. The only thing that I will say is that former township areas in JHB are improving compared to areas like Khayalitsha and the Cape Flats. I do think that culture wise, Cape Town has a lot going for it; in JHB, the only thing still needed is an Eiffel Tower. It is not an uglier city than Paris, but it is not (yet) a tourist destination.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y agoThat's not entirely true. Citation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://www.enca.com/south-africa/crime-stats-reveal-western-cape-holds-most-murder-hotspots https://www.enca.com/south-africa/crime-stats-reveal-western... https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/270771/this-is-south-africas-murder-capital/ https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/270771/this-is-so...
- StreamBright 8y agoThailand when?
- projectileboy 8y agoI realize that Africa is an enormous continent; I'm just curious if this doesn't also help out developers and startups in places like Nigeria...? I don't have a sense of the topology of the Internet throughout Africa vs particular African nations and the rest of the world.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y agoThe backbone topology is mapped here https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ I linked to it in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309 The backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. Cape Town is on that coast. So is Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria, the most populous country. But the most populous area and economic hub of South Africa is around Johannesburg, which is far from the coast. We assume that AWS took the decision that the South African economy today was more important than the Nigerian economy; this data centre won't be much closer to Nigeria than European data centres are. Or maybe the double distance, double lag time at South Africa is a bigger reduction to eliminate. This press release https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-is-coming-to-south-africa.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-i... says "The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will ... provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa" We can assume that this statement is truer the further south of the Sahara you go ;)
- ma2rten 8y agoThe backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. I believe you that this is the case, but the map you linked is a submarine cable map. If there were backbone ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago> If there were backbone cables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up (on that map of submarine cables) Good point. I haven't found a lot of resource on this topic. The exception, which discusses the growth of terrestrial networks is this: http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 e.g. > Of the total activated/ sold bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 3.065 Tbps (92.3%) was supplied directly by submarine cable. > Of the total bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 248 Gbps (7.5%) was supplied by terrestrial cross-border networks connected to submarine cables. The completion of new cross-border links, and the expansion of capacity on others, has seen the volume of intra-regional traffic backhauled to submarine cable landing points increase by 65% in the last year I note also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912 > I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London Simply, the network is at present not optimised for traffic between e.g. Johannesburg and Lagos. Why would it be? There's not a lot of it. An internet user in Johannesburg is mostly either going to look at domestic websites in SA, or the "top 1000" sites, hosted in EU and USA. I hope that this will change over time, and better data centres in Africa is part of that.
- karpodiem 8y agoWonder how long it will take for the data center to be confiscated.
- somanyquestions 8y agoThis is great news! Does AWS publish performance statistics for the different regions, e.g. what is the average ping time to servers in this region when pinged from San Francisco & Tokyo?
- myroon5 8y agoNot exactly what you're looking for, but this might help: https://www.cloudping.co https://www.cloudping.co
- 01100011 8y agoAny guesses on when we'll see the first AWS region in space? Would it make sense to have shared computing resources 'above the clouds' to facilitate science and engineering missions? Is there ever a point at which it is better to compute in space rather than blast the data back to earth(which incurs significant latency and potentially bandwidth)?
- WaxProlix 8y agoYou could do it right now, just shoot some snowball edges into space. You'd have all of the usual space-y problems, but I think edges are being used on tankers and things right now, so the not-always-connected chunk of cloud problem is sovled(ish). https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/
- joncrane 8y agoIt's all economics. As soon as the breakeven point of a space-based datacenter goes below a certain threshold, you'd better believe AWS will start building them.
- nostrebored 8y agoThis is great news for companies operating in South Africa that often face unreasonable latencies or costs of maintaining data centers here. Protectionist laws wrt electronics and lack of competition have led to high prices for smaller companies. Excited to see what this does for the startup scene here.