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Africa needs more data centers
- rijoja 7y agoThis is a very interesting point and also an opportunity! There aren't that many underseas cable to and from Africa either am I right? So at least in southern parts I'd say that congestion over the cables will become an issue. Something that wouldn't be the case between say Europe and the US.
- smartbit 7y agoavito.ma is the largest site in Maroc. Before they moved to Amazon, they were hosted in Spain, because hosters in Maroc were not reliable enough.
- skc 7y agoIt's true but what we need here is cheap and reliable power first.
- python_gt_r3 7y agoWhy do you want data centers when you got mud huts
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- EwanToo 7y agoAWS are launching a region in South Africa in "early 2020" https://aws.amazon.com/local/africa/ https://aws.amazon.com/local/africa/ Azure also has pair of DCs in South Africa https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/global-infrastructure/southafrica/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/global-infrastructure/sout... but clearly the nortern parts of the continent will need more coverage. I wonder what the continental fibre infrastructure looks like. Does most of the traffic go via a handful of choke points on the way out of Africa, and would traffic from Kenya to Nigeria (for example) go via somewhere like South Africa, despite the extra length of distance involved?
- coob 7y agoYes, there's basically no overland links in South Sudan / DRC: http://www.itu.int/itu-d/tnd-map-public/ http://www.itu.int/itu-d/tnd-map-public/
- toyg 7y agoWonder what the story is with Uganda, they seem to have a better backbone than their neighbours despite being landlocked.
- ewheeler 7y agoUganda is home to a large regional hub for UN logistics, a state-of-the-art CDC infectious disease laboratory, and similar outposts--presumably due to Uganda's relative stability over the past few decades and strategic proximity to several less-stable neighbors.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoThat's unsurprising, as both are essentially failed states.
- ganoushoreilly 7y agoAs well as on the ITAR list.
- tinktank 7y agoBut isn't the issue wider than just not having datacenters? As I understand it the issue is multi-faced and composed of: 1. Reliable power 2. Reliable connectivity. 3. Lack of trust from users (prefer outside providers) 4. Expensive (no economy of scale) 5. Lack of inter-country connectivity. All of this makes it hard to actually build a profitable data center provider. I am sure I'm wrong though, I'd be interested in your opinion on this.
- jmpman 7y agoStarlink should make a good portion of Africa just a 50ms ping away from South Africa or Egypt.
- PeterisP 7y agoThe article states that "collocation in African Data Centers costing more than double the cost in the US and Europe." So the issue is not that "more data centers are needed urgently" but rather than the question of why the price situation is the way it is. The main expenses of a data center (just colocation, not renting VMs) are the capital costs of building/renting the facility (including digging some land to pull fiber etc) and paying staff. It's not obvious to me why in Africa these costs would be higher than in Europe, but apparently there's some reason. I don't see reliable power as a big differentiator since even in the first world your data center anyway needs backup generators; it's just that they would get used much more often. I don't see expensive bandwidth as a big differentiator since (as far as I understand) the big bottleneck is the undersea cables, and hosting your data on the "wrong side" of these cables should be more expensive - ISPs (at least elsewhere) prefer to cache/re-host/CDN popular data locally as some extra servers in ISPs datacenter turn out to be cheaper than hardware needed for all the extra traffic.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoNot everything is cheaper in a poorer country. Sometimes things are even more expensive there because they're uncommon.
- toyg 7y agoIncluding a skilled workforce, I would assume (relative to the local average).
- BurningFrog 7y agoSecurity. Both personal, and that things tend to get stolen. One reason cell phones are so big in the poor world is that you can't leave cables lying around there.
- GauntletWizard 7y agoPower. Reliable power is hard to come by and is more expensive. Power availability and cost is a significant factor in data center location in the states.
- canada_dry 7y agohttps://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/news/china-telecom-global-builds-its-africa-hub-in-teraco-data-centers https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/news/china-telecom-glob... I'm sure China telecom will step up as part of their widening reach and influence in Africa.
- minikites 7y agoI'm sure they'll also fill it floor-to-ceiling with bugs: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/china-planted-bugs-while-building-african-union-hq-wqgw5ff7q https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/china-planted-bugs-while-...
- zackbloom 7y agoLighterweight virtualization can make it affordable to have many more, smaller, data centers, allowing a presence in Africa. If you write a Cloudflare Worker [1] it can be executed in any of our 11 PoPs there [2]. 1- https://workers.cloudflare.com/ https://workers.cloudflare.com/ 2- https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ https://www.cloudflare.com/network/
- dade_ 7y agoToo difficult to run a business there. ZA Has become a basket case banana republic and the rand keeps falling. Full on GTFO by anyone who wants a future and can afford to leave.
- phit_ 7y agounrelated to this post, this account seems to just automatically post all new posts from that specific website? isn't that basically just spam
- segmondy 7y agoIf you host your data center in Africa, but use cloud services in USA or Europe, the latency is going to kill you and your app will even be slower. So you must be willing to give up using AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. If not, then the title of the talk should be AWS, Azure, GCP should build data centers in Africa, but then it doesn't make sense economically. The article mentioned how Nigerians spend about $60 million a year on outside data centers. VCs won't even invest in a software only startup that will make $60mil a year. Let alone a business like a datacenter that needs physical location, properties, personnel, etc
- L_226 7y agoAWS is opening a datacentre in SA next year: https://aws.amazon.com/local/africa/ https://aws.amazon.com/local/africa/
- danielrhodes 7y agoFun fact: EC2/AWS created by a team out of Cape Town.
- gatvol 7y agoCape Town has a few things going for it: fairly good infrastructure, proximity to cable landing stations, and a nuclear power station.
- coderintherye 7y agoYou are ignoring that there are services in Africa focused on the African market. These services could greatly benefit from hosting in a data center and serving their customers from the same continent without having to hop to the EU and back. Granted, depending on where you are (equatorial coast vs. southern) then you may end up hopping anyways because there isn't much (any?) direct usable fiber across the continent.
- hedvig 7y ago>VCs won't even invest in a software only startup that will make $60mil a year. So you're saying capitalism has limitations on what it focuses on?
- stcredzero 7y agoHow much datacenter could one fit into a satellite weighting 30 tons? What if there was a Starlink style contellation of datacenters? Power would be a big issue, of course. If these were in low Earth orbit, latency would be low, and if they had high speed point-to-point communications, virtual servers could be paused, serialized, then sent to the next satellite to go overhead in a specific region. Granted, it would be way too expensive at the present time, even with reusable Falcon rockets.
- tekno45 7y agothats a lot of mass in low earth orbit that may not burn up during a deorbiting re-entry.
- stcredzero 7y agoTrue, but an airliner full of fuel might also cause an explosion and fire. Those are flying over highly populated cities, and we trust the industry to retain control of them and set them down safely. The kinetic energy of a 30 metric ton datacenter moving at 9.8 km/s is 1,440,600,000,000 joules. That's a bit more energy than 344 tons of TNT and a bit more than 12,000 gallons of gasoline equivalent. That's actually much less than the energy embodied in a 747 with full tanks. (If I've calculated correctly.)
- tekno45 7y agoOne is aerodynamic and pilotable in atmosphere and has lot of active parties involved at all times The other has to be pretty hands off to be profitable. and would be a literal building in space. Both would be dangerous to have crash, it's easier to prevent the plane from coming down though.
- diveanon 7y agoWhile working briefly for a telecom I was involved in a project that was installing point to point microwave transmitters in Africa instead of fiber optic cable because the locals kept cutting the cables hoping to steal the non-existent copper. Without the logistical infrastructure in place I don't know how you hope to drop a data center in Africa and hope to have costs be anywhere near what they are in the developed world.