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Now Open – AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region
- cbg0 6y agoAzure bandwidth out of their Africa datacenters is $0.181 per GB, while AWS is $0.154 per GB, will be interesting to see if this forces Azure prices down.
- temptemptemp111 6y agoSo this must mean serious fiber is available in SA... Up to what speed? From where did AWS get its internet connection into this region?
- xvilka 6y agoI hope they will consider creating a new region also in Lagos, Nigeria. It's the booming[1] megalopolis and biggest city in Africa. [1] https://www.brinknews.com/this-country-recently-became-africas-largest-economy-now-its-too-big-for-businesses-to-ignore/ https://www.brinknews.com/this-country-recently-became-afric...
- 1290cc 6y agoThe AWS EC2 service was invented in Cape Town, AWS already have a lab and infrastructure there so its easier for them to scale up infrastructure when the people, skills and local ecosystem is already present.
- possibleworlds 6y agoFrom memory the initial development on AWS was actually done in South Africa. Yup, here we go... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Servi...
- RocketSyntax 6y agoOoo I wonder if this will be the standard for African EHR and PHI
- inopinatus 6y agoI fell asleep reading this article and had a sort of half dream about a post-apocalyptic game in which you the amnesiac protagonist (whose initials are “AZ”) gain consciousness aboard the MV Dirona, and to discover yourself must awake an ancient demon, a task that actually involves finding and activating long-lost AWS data centers, solving progressively harder puzzles using only in-game clues, a voice conferencing service over which a mysterious and cantankerous but also very tired-sounding voice feeds you tidbits of cryptic information in a mocking and self-righteous tone, and the gradually collected pieces of a 20,000 page wiki printout titled “Cold Start of AWS Region (confidential)” that is only about 80% accurate for each site. Along the way you discover you are very good at playing yourself at board games, which is a key mechanic, and your rating improves with each region successfully started. Final boss is us-east-1 of course, after which the identity of the “voice”, and the protagonist, are revealed. Sort of like Myst, with an inverted Adam and Eve thing going on, and a lot more JSON.
- kylehotchkiss 6y agoI wonder if this will improve international connectivity times once Cape Town's Cloudfront is warmed up since the underseas cables wouldn't need to carry as many CDNed assets due to new region presence.
- TeslaRoadster2 6y agoDoes anyone know how this will affect the water issues that Cape Town have been having? As far as I know, Cape Town's 'Zero Day' is still something people are cognizant of.
- TheCapeGreek 6y agoNot really actually. The drought ended. It does go in some regular cycles if you look at the historical dam water levels. Currently were out of the bad times, but efforts need to be scaled up to be ready for next time. Politically speaking this won't happen though. In terms of climate, CPT is basically a more windy Los Angeles/SF.
- becauseiam 6y agoEvery time a new AWS region is made public, it continues to highlight the disparity in services availability across the regions, as well as making information about services available. Many regions are "discovered" because the ip-regions.json file is updated long before the press release, but it will be some weeks to months before key information needed to spin up infrastructure appears in documentation, for example things like the ELB hosted zone identifier, which at time of writing is not documented.
- jeffbarr 6y ago> things like the ELB hosted zone identifier If you file a ticket on the proper page, I am sure that my colleagues will fix it ASAP. Go to the page and click "Provide feedback."
- becauseiam 6y agoTo extend what I'm trying to say is that customers shouldn't have to do this and that updating of this data (which ideally should be in a machine readable format, much like ip-ranges.json) is just another step. I would like to hope that AWS already has playbooks for taking a region out of closed-beta and making it GA. If the listing of af-south-1 is already present on other sections of documentation this may already be the case. I'll send the feedback through anyhow.
- xchaotic 6y agoShow me that magic unicorn company that spins data centres like that with 0 documentation bugs and I’ll join you criticising them. As it stands with limited resources I am pretty impressed with the speed AWS keeps adding capacity around the world.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- FigmentEngine 6y agolimited?
- numbsafari 6y agoOf the big public cloud providers, Microsoft came to Africa first. As far as I know, GCP doesn’t have anything on the roadmap for Africa.
- koalalorenzo 6y agoI don't think they are playing the game of "Who is first attacking a market". I bet some Azure clients are happy to move to AWS if they were forced to use Azure due to being the only one. I bet also the other way around.
- manojlds 6y agoSouth Africa has a huge .NET market.
- jen20 6y agoMy speculation is that Azure was in ZA first though because of Office 365 however!
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoWhy would GCP expand when they are looking to kill the product offering?
- ernsheong 6y agoThere is a lot of snark surrounding GCP. I'll just leave this here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/infrastructure/new-google-cloud-regions-for-2020 https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/infrastructure/new-goog... This year alone GCP will launch new regions in Delhi (India), Doha (Qatar), Melbourne (Australia) and Toronto (Canada).
- karambahh 6y agoCan you elaborate on this? I've never heard before that they are trying to kill GCP?
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- WilliamEdward 6y agoCape Town is becoming a serious tech hub
- ignoramous 6y agoFwiw, EC2 was founded in Cape Town and continues to have a big presence to date. Later, the founding team built Nimbula, kind of DC/OS of the time. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/nimbula_cloud_os/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/nimbula_cloud_os/ Also see: http://www.adccpt.com/#/challenges http://www.adccpt.com/#/challenges
- bbgm 6y agoThis video was shot in 2016 (at EC2s 10 year anniversary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gk_I_0eMDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gk_I_0eMDA ... almost all of the folks in this video are still there.
- cpach 6y agoCool! Had no clue that it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#H...
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoThe source is dead. I thought wikipedia would be better about that
- hk__2 6y ago> The source is dead. I thought wikipedia would be better about that You could have fixed it instead of writing such comment. Wikipedia is nothing without the thousands of volunteers writing (and fixing!) content on it.
- hendry 6y agoThey must have had to do extra work to cover for the failing South African electricity supply. Awesome news as a South African. Guess Amazon's network blows away TENET? ;)
- Havoc 6y agoI'd imagine they'd stick the datacenter somewhere that doesn't get regularly blackouts. I don't think you'd want to use generators that often
- joeraut 6y agoSouth African data center providers seem to have nailed reliable generator power - "...their systems are designed to operate continuously and effectively, regardless of whether they receive power from the national grid." [0] I don't want to imagine the cost. On another note, load shedding (i.e. scheduled blackouts) have been implemented pretty uniformly fortunately, with areas following different published schedules - there's even an app for that! [1] [0] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/cloud-hosting/336800-how-south-african-data-centres-have-prepared-for-load-shedding.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/cloud-hosting/336800-how-sout... [1] https://sepush.co.za/ https://sepush.co.za/
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago> Africa (Cape Town) is the 23rd AWS Region, and the first one in Africa. It is comprised of three Availability Zones That means 3 data centres.
- Havoc 6y agoQuite. South Africa has a string of rolling black-outs though...some lasting as long as 8 hours at a time during bad spells. Some you'll be running off generators as primary source (with no backup) far more than you'd normally expect even if you have multiple data centres. Easiest way around that is to locate it in an area exempt from the rolling blackouts as I said.
- Havoc 6y agoNice. Some competition for Azure.
- whitehouse3 6y agoI know Epic Games uses AWS for their Fortnite matchmaking servers. And an African region has been a long-time player request. Maybe those wishes will be fulfilled soon.
- Havoc 6y agoYeah lots of games leverage AWS. Solid win for gaming in Africa
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoIt's a new data-centre. How does that have a bearing on the way Epic manage their matchmaking? Matchmaking isn't latency-sensitive, is it?
- Qwuke 6y agoMy South African cousins have desperately wanted an African Fortnite server. When playing on EU servers their latency was around 200ms on a good day iirc.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoOh, right. That's not a matchmaking server then, that's a dedicated multiplayer game server. Matchmaking is, to use Wikipedia's definition, the process of connecting players together for online play sessions.
- tsukurimashou 6y agoin modern games matchmaking = game servers which can be confusing in a lot of games you cannot see a server list anymore, you can only use matchmaking (usually casual / ranked) and the matchmaking handles spinning up servers depending on the load.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoThey're still not the same service. Matchmaking is about grouping people together for the game, presumably dependent on their geographical location (for latency) and their skill-level (to balance the game), etc. Dedicated game servers, on the other hand, host the actual multiplayer session. It's similar to the distinction Netflix uses between their control plane (hosted on AWS) and their content-delivery (hosted on their 'Open Connect' CDN).
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoAlso https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943445 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943674
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoYou might be wondering "why Cape Town"? when it is right at the bottom of Africa, and the Southern African business hub is around Johannesburg, 1262 km / 784 miles away, and the next area that needs it is Lagos, Nigeria ( 4760 km / 2958 miles). However I think there are some upsides to Cape Town, i.e. 1) AWS already has team and infrastructure there in Cape Town. It is a bit of a tech hub as well. 2) Submarine cables land in Cape Town - and they cannot in Johannesburg as it is far inland. By length of internet cable, Cape Town is actually closer than it seems to other parts of Africa. (a) a lot of the connectivity is around the coast, not so much over land. There's probably a shorter ping time between Lagos and Cape Town than there is between Lagos and Johannesburg, despite the map distances being the other way around. 3) The further north you go from Cape Town, the closer you are to data centres in Europe. Cape Town is closest to exactly those parts that are worst served by Europe. I have no inside knowledge as to AWS chose Cape Town, but those seem like likely factors. a) https://www.networkplatforms.co.za/information/our-network https://www.networkplatforms.co.za/information/our-network
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoSince this got popular and I can't edit any more: 1) Cape Town is not the Southernmost point of Africa, but it is very far south, and does contain the Cape of Good Hope, the Southwestern-most point. There are no population centres that are further south (Port Elizabeth is about the same latitude) 2) "...the next area that needs it is Lagos" ... and other central African cities such as Kinshasa and Accra. It might make sense if the second African AWS region is located hereabouts. 3) "... to data centres in Europe" ... and Middle-East, of course.
- pinkfoot 6y ago> I have no inside knowledge as to AWS chose Cape Town. Well its public knowledge that Amazon has had a dev team in Cape Town for many years and they were part of the initial ECC efforts.
- kolikotime 6y agoAwesome news, especially for gaming on the continent. I won't lie, AWS Cape Town is kind of a dream gig for African technologists.
- curiousgal 6y agoNo it's not, if I'm based in Tunisia for example, why would I pick that region over one in Europe?
- swebs 6y agoWell then you would be based in Europe, thus ruling out the original qualifier.
- sgt 6y agoTunisia is practically Europe.
- curiousgal 6y agoThat's my point. It makes no sense to talk about "Africa".
- kolikotime 6y agoI perhaps should have qualified this with Sub Saharan Africa. Tunisia and the rest of North Africa might as well culturally be another world.
- joeraut 6y agoThis is a great step-up for companies using AWS here in SA. On a personal note, my latency for my personal site will drop from ~170ms (eu-west-2) to ~3ms!
- k__ 6y agoI would have expected they open up one in Lagos.