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

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#51

Post by joncrane » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #45

Any 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)?

It's all economics. As soon as the breakeven point of a space-based datacenter goes below a certain threshold, you'd better believe AWS will start building them.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#52

Post by bbgm » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

donretag wrote: post #28

hacknat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This video talks a little bit about the EC2 team in Cape Town (a team that I’ve always enjoyed working with). It was made at the 10 yr anniversary of EC2.

https://youtu.be/9Gk_I_0eMDA

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#53

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 7:17 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #50

ma2rten wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dir…

> There's not a lot of it.

If internet traffic is anything like road traffic then the presence of a highway would generate more traffic. Having a crappy connection pretty much guarantees that there is little traffic!

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#54

Post by outworlder » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

laichzeit0 wrote: post #6

But only in 2020... Isn't Azure supposed to be up this year?

Yes. No availability zones though.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#55

Post by nostrebored » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:09 PM UTC

ti_ranger wrote: post #34

donretag wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Since then, most of AWS transitioned back to Seattle and the CT team focuses on some of the tooling around AWS. This is not true. Most of AWS was never in Cape Town, only most of EC2. And lots of EC2 development still occurs in Cape Town. EC2 has just grown immensely, so even though EC2 developers in Cape Town are now at least 25 times more than at launch, there are teams working on EC2-specific stuff in a number o…

Accurate. A large portion of internal tooling is developed in Cape Town as well.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#56

Post by Synaesthesia » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:10 PM UTC

throwaway34re3 wrote: post #42

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #20

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.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.

My friend, there is a murder epidemic right nearby Cape Town and there is plenty of crime there, I would say more even than Gauteng (Pretoria and Johannesburg)

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#57

Post by nostrebored » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:12 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #37

ti_ranger wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It probably doesn't help developers in Nigeria get lower latency or cheaper access to AWS, but it may help them get more customers more quickly,…

> data centres in Nigeria ... the electrical supply is not very reliable Electrical supply in Cape Town has had issues too: https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding I expect that data centers will use a lot of power in summer when the temperature outside gets around 40 C (over 100 F)

Large swathes of the Western Cape have very reliable electricity, and I would assume that these areas are being targeted for availability zones

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#58

Post by nostrebored » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:15 PM UTC

This is great news for companies operating in South Africa that often face unreasonable latencies or costs of maintaining data centers here. Protectionist laws wrt electronics and lack of competition have led to high prices for smaller companies. Excited to see what this does for the startup scene here.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#59

Post by zamalek » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

mikorym wrote: post #21

rootsudo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can get cellphone data for much, much cheaper (try Afrihost mobile).

Having recently moved to US, I'm amazed at how backward fixed internet access is here and how first-class it is in SA. Fibre is rare even in urban areas, I specifically asked my estate agent to find someplace with Comcast competition at best and Comcast fibre at worst - she couldn't manage either.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#60

Post by myroon5 » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:38 PM UTC

somanyquestions wrote: post #41

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?

Not exactly what you're looking for, but this might help: https://www.cloudping.co