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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

#61

Post by thatcloudguy »

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 issue with SEA is almost entirely to do with shitty telcos who run barely adequate gear, are staffed with semi-competent monkeys and who have no participation in peering fabrics. Yes, the infrastructure is in rough shape as well, just like in Africa.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#62

Post by thatcloudguy »

ma2rten wrote: post #38
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

There isn't much overland cable in Africa. The distance is too far to maintain in a cost effective way.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#63

Post by orf »

tills13 wrote: post #47
mikorym wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's one game.

The largest game, by a large margin.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#64

Post by Havoc »

ma2rten wrote: post #38
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

There are no overland backbones to my knowledge. At least not in the continuous sense - I suppose you could patch together a web of adjacent country networks. Country internal there is a pretty good web of them, mostly to connect cellphone towers.

In reality everything goes via the submarine cables though. It's easier than fighting through the landrights of 6,000 miles of sometimes shaky countries.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#65

Post by Havoc »

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…

There is <10ms between the two so either would have been feasible.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#66

Post by philwelch »

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…

> Cape Town also has a large team of support engineers in Premium Support, and handles all Premium Support calls for about 6 hours a day (IIRC).

Legacy of the empire--there's almost always an English-speaking population in normal business hours.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#67

Post by sangnoir »

ma2rten wrote: post #38
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #31

Earlier 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 ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up.

There are, and the information in sibling comments is either wrong or outdated. Liquid has a fiber network that literally stretches from "Cape to Cairo"[1]. Liquid has a presence in Nigeria, but it's not connected to the overland fiber network

[1] https://www.liquidtelecom.com/about-us/network-map.html

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#68

Post by ti_ranger »

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)

> > 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

Oh wow, one day of residential load shedding in the past year.

Nigeria had a country-wide electrical outage this year: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/254308-updated...

A few years ago, I was somewhat involved with some data centres in Nigeria, which ran on generators 2-3 times a day for at last an hour each time, every day, for more than a year, due to the electrical grid in the city (Lagos) going down. The locals indicated that this was normal (e.g. had been like this for years).

Ghana has much more reliable electricity than Nigeria.

A few more articles:

http://dailypost.ng/2018/07/24/nigeria-may-not-stable-power-...

https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-challenge-keepi...

"To cope with the frequent blackouts and lack of access, a quarter of Nigerians relied on generators in 2016"

South Africa's electricity generation (Eskom) has problems, but nothing like Nigeria's (yet).

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#69

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

sangnoir wrote: post #67
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 ables inside of Africa, they wouldn't show up. There are, and the information in sibling comments is either wrong or outdated. Liquid has a fiber network that literally stretches from "Cape to Cairo"[1]. Liquid has a presence in Nigeria, but it's not connected to the overland fiber network [1] https://www.liquidtelecom.com/about-us/network-map.html

That's very interesting, thanks. And also fairly new?

> covering Africa's fastest-growing economies, where no fixed network has ever existed before.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#70

Post by cthalupa »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #33
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.

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…

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_...

The comment by Bill Warnecke seems to indicate that some of the Overwatch fleet is hosted on AWS.

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