4 ms·

Probably 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 yo

Probably 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 ago
How big is the gaming industry so far? My impression of the younger peer group is that it's pretty big.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  Last time I looked at it, it's the largest industry after the 'adult' industry.
- tills13 8y ago
  Fornite makes $250m a month (by some reports) and is entirely hosted on AWS. That's one game.
  - mikorym 8y ago
    Makes 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 ago
      Sure, but there are _hundreds_ of games.
sitepodmatt 8y ago
It doesn't necessarily mean the GaaSs (and equally PaaSs) will utilize the new region, there's a couple reasons, sometimes dependent services are rolled out slowly elsewhere - e.g. bigquery, cloud/pub, even their end user Workmail has limited regions, in addition sometimes the egress network and compute charges could be a multiple of us-east/west making the offering prohibitively expensive, and then it depends on the local connectivity itself, if major eyeball / gamer ISPs won't peer initially it might just be as well hosting in nearest Europe region to avoid the double RTL - you see this effect in markets like Singapore with Singtel, Germany with DTAC, and to a degree US with Comcast when server providers pick up local transit from HE/cogent even NTT in some parts - when AWS opened Singapore it was universally terrible routing until they got aggressive about peering and remote peering in the region. Good news nonetheless, early days though...
- ti_ranger 8y ago
  > if major eyeball / gamer ISPs won't peer initially Almost all the major retail ISPs in South Africa openly peer at NAPAfrica (https://www.napafrica.net/ https://www.napafrica.net/), mainly to pick up Akamai, Google, and more recently CloudFront, but also to bypass expensive local transit costs from the local 'carriers' (Telkom/Openserve, MTN, Vodacom, Internet Solutions etc.). As far as I know, only the mobile networks (some of whom are building out FTTH networks, but with relatively limited market share) don't openly peer there: - Vodacom - MTN https://www.napafrica.net/traffic/ https://www.napafrica.net/traffic/ NAPAfrica currently does ~500Gbps of traffic. Approx 4 years ago it was ~10Gbps.
jonathanlydall 8y ago
Sorry, it’s unlikely that Overwatch latency would improve specifically from this as I am very doubtful that it is hosted on AWS, or any cloud provider for that matter. I worked customer support for Blizzard Europe for several years until about 2012. At the time they ran their own infrastructure co-located in ISP data centres. It was very important to Blizzard to have as much control of the quality of the user gaming experience as possible, with control of their infrastructure being a large part of this, and I would be very surprised to hear this philosophy of theirs has changed. Then again, I don’t know for sure what they’re doing these days.
- dvlsg 8y ago
  Not blizzard specifically, more Activision-blizzard, but the latest call of duty open beta was reportedly running on vultr for at least some of the game servers. I think they moved it back to in-house servers when it went live, though, and dropped the server rates from 60hz to 20hz. Kind of a shame, the difference was very noticeable.
- bsagdiyev 8y ago
  Anecdotal, but afaik Blizzard uses AWS for Overwatch in the US. A friend who works as a systems engineer told me they hit some ridiculous cap on an AWS region a few years back and it caused issues for a bit.
- cthalupa 8y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_overwatch_servers_are_named_by_airports/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_... The comment by Bill Warnecke seems to indicate that some of the Overwatch fleet is hosted on AWS.
- andkenneth 8y ago
  Things must have changed. I've worked in esports in Australia, and I know that professional OW players use tools to specifically give nearby IP ranges high ping so they can play on the region of their choosing. AUS players have a jsfiddle they link around which grabs the current IP ranges for AWS so they know what to block to be able to play on NA servers. They do this because the local playerpool is much smaller, to the point where they cannot climb to very high ranks without playing overseas.

mikorym 8y ago

How big is the gaming industry so far? My impression of the younger peer group is that it's pretty big.

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
Last time I looked at it, it's the largest industry after the 'adult' industry.
tills13 8y ago
Fornite makes $250m a month (by some reports) and is entirely hosted on AWS. That's one game.
- mikorym 8y ago
  Makes 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 ago
    Sure, but there are _hundreds_ of games.

sitepodmatt 8y ago

It doesn't necessarily mean the GaaSs (and equally PaaSs) will utilize the new region, there's a couple reasons, sometimes dependent services are rolled out slowly elsewhere - e.g. bigquery, cloud/pub, even their end user Workmail has limited regions, in addition sometimes the egress network and compute charges could be a multiple of us-east/west making the offering prohibitively expensive, and then it depends on the local connectivity itself, if major eyeball / gamer ISPs won't peer initially it might just be as well hosting in nearest Europe region to avoid the double RTL - you see this effect in markets like Singapore with Singtel, Germany with DTAC, and to a degree US with Comcast when server providers pick up local transit from HE/cogent even NTT in some parts - when AWS opened Singapore it was universally terrible routing until they got aggressive about peering and remote peering in the region. Good news nonetheless, early days though...

ti_ranger 8y ago
> if major eyeball / gamer ISPs won't peer initially Almost all the major retail ISPs in South Africa openly peer at NAPAfrica (https://www.napafrica.net/ https://www.napafrica.net/), mainly to pick up Akamai, Google, and more recently CloudFront, but also to bypass expensive local transit costs from the local 'carriers' (Telkom/Openserve, MTN, Vodacom, Internet Solutions etc.). As far as I know, only the mobile networks (some of whom are building out FTTH networks, but with relatively limited market share) don't openly peer there: - Vodacom - MTN https://www.napafrica.net/traffic/ https://www.napafrica.net/traffic/ NAPAfrica currently does ~500Gbps of traffic. Approx 4 years ago it was ~10Gbps.

jonathanlydall 8y ago

Sorry, it’s unlikely that Overwatch latency would improve specifically from this as I am very doubtful that it is hosted on AWS, or any cloud provider for that matter. I worked customer support for Blizzard Europe for several years until about 2012. At the time they ran their own infrastructure co-located in ISP data centres. It was very important to Blizzard to have as much control of the quality of the user gaming experience as possible, with control of their infrastructure being a large part of this, and I would be very surprised to hear this philosophy of theirs has changed. Then again, I don’t know for sure what they’re doing these days.

dvlsg 8y ago
Not blizzard specifically, more Activision-blizzard, but the latest call of duty open beta was reportedly running on vultr for at least some of the game servers. I think they moved it back to in-house servers when it went live, though, and dropped the server rates from 60hz to 20hz. Kind of a shame, the difference was very noticeable.
bsagdiyev 8y ago
Anecdotal, but afaik Blizzard uses AWS for Overwatch in the US. A friend who works as a systems engineer told me they hit some ridiculous cap on an AWS region a few years back and it caused issues for a bit.
cthalupa 8y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_overwatch_servers_are_named_by_airports/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_... The comment by Bill Warnecke seems to indicate that some of the Overwatch fleet is hosted on AWS.
andkenneth 8y ago
Things must have changed. I've worked in esports in Australia, and I know that professional OW players use tools to specifically give nearby IP ranges high ping so they can play on the region of their choosing. AUS players have a jsfiddle they link around which grabs the current IP ranges for AWS so they know what to block to be able to play on NA servers. They do this because the local playerpool is much smaller, to the point where they cannot climb to very high ranks without playing overseas.