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An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

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Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#11

Post by rootsudo »

grandinj wrote: post #4

Yay, 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.

Same 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..

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#12

Post by grandinj »

rootsudo wrote: post #11
grandinj wrote: post #4

Yay, 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.

Same 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..

Not 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.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#14

Post by CaptainJustin »

rootsudo wrote: post #11
grandinj wrote: post #4

Yay, 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.

Same 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..

Infrastructure isn't bad. Most of my friends have fibre. I have 100Mbps up / 100Mbps down. Latency to datacenters in SA varies: 1 to 20ms

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#15

Post by lnx01 »

rootsudo wrote: post #11
grandinj wrote: post #4

Yay, 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.

Same 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..

Better 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.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#17

Post by stephengillie »

lgleason wrote: post #3

I feel bad for all of the local providers down there such as Afrihost, CloudAfrica etc.. Big companies pushing out the little guys sadly...

Hopefully 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.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#18

Post by numbsafari »

lgleason wrote: post #3

I feel bad for all of the local providers down there such as Afrihost, CloudAfrica etc.. Big companies pushing out the little guys sadly...

There 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.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#19

Post by hacknat »

improbable22 wrote: post #16

Worth 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_Service...

Most 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.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#20

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

In 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/ - Cape Town is at the South-West-most point where all those cables come in )

2) AWS already has an operation in Cape Town.

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