This is great news!
Does AWS publish performance statistics for the different regions, e.g. what is the average ping time to servers in this region when pinged from San Francisco & Tokyo?
An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#42In 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.submarinecablem…
3) Johannesburg is one of the largest murder/crime zones in the country, whereas Cape Town is one of the last areas remaining in the country that has a low murder/crime rate.
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#43Probably 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.
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…
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.
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#44Probably 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.
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…
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.
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#45Any guesses on when we'll see the first AWS region in space? Would it make sense to have shared computing resources 'above the clouds' to facilitate science and engineering missions? Is there ever a point at which it is better to compute in space rather than blast the data back to earth(which incurs significant latency and potentially bandwidth)?
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#46I 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...
You can use AWS as a simple DO but it will probably be more costly.
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#47Probably 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.
Fornite makes $250m a month (by some reports) and is entirely hosted on AWS.
That's one game.
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#48In 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.submarinecablem…
3) Johannesburg is one of the largest murder/crime zones in the country, whereas Cape Town is one of the last areas remaining in the country that has a low murder/crime rate.
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#49Any guesses on when we'll see the first AWS region in space? Would it make sense to have shared computing resources 'above the clouds' to facilitate science and engineering missions? Is there ever a point at which it is better to compute in space rather than blast the data back to earth(which incurs significant latency and potentially bandwidth)?
You could do it right now, just shoot some snowball edges into space. You'd have all of the usual space-y problems, but I think edges are being used on tankers and things right now, so the not-always-connected chunk of cloud problem is sovled(ish).
Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The backbone topology is mapped here https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ I linked to it in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309 The backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. Cape Town is on that coast. So is Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria, the most populous country. But the most populous area and economic hub of South Africa is around Johannesburg, which is far from the coast. We…
The backbone cables loop around the coast of Africa. I believe you that this is the case, but the map you linked is a submarine cable map. If there were backbone ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up.
> If there were backbone cables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up (on that map of submarine cables)
Good point. I haven't found a lot of resource on this topic. The exception, which discusses the growth of terrestrial networks is this:
http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 e.g.
> Of the total activated/ sold bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 3.065 Tbps (92.3%) was supplied directly by submarine cable.
> Of the total bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 248 Gbps (7.5%) was supplied by terrestrial cross-border networks connected to submarine cables. The completion of new cross-border links, and the expansion of capacity on others, has seen the volume of intra-regional traffic backhauled to submarine cable landing points increase by 65% in the last year
I note also this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912
> I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London
Simply, the network is at present not optimised for traffic between e.g. Johannesburg and Lagos. Why would it be? There's not a lot of it. An internet user in Johannesburg is mostly either going to look at domestic websites in SA, or the "top 1000" sites, hosted in EU and USA.
I hope that this will change over time, and better data centres in Africa is part of that.