An AWS Region is coming to South Africa • Hacker News Board

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#21

Post by mikorym » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 12:25 PM UTC

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..

The 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...

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#22

Post by mikorym » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 12:26 PM UTC

hacknat wrote: post #19

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.

Did not know this—even though I knew Cape Town had a AWS team.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#23

Post by mikorym » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 12:31 PM UTC

andkenneth wrote: post #9

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.

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

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#24

Post by sitepodmatt » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

andkenneth wrote: post #9

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.

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...

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#25

Post by sitepodmatt » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 1:38 PM UTC

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...

Rackspace has done well becoming a VAR of AWS, winding down their own datacenters, and pushing their support angle

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#26

Post by nsomaru » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

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...

No 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...

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#27

Post by StreamBright » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

Thailand when?

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#28

Post by donretag » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 2:17 PM UTC

hacknat wrote: post #19

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.

Since 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.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#29

Post by influx » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

hacknat wrote: post #19

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.

This is true for EC2, but not at all for S3, which has always been developed in Seattle.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#30

Post by projectileboy » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

I 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.