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An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

allthingsdistributed.com

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Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#31

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

projectileboy wrote: post #30

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.

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 assume that AWS took the decision that the South African economy today was more important than the Nigerian economy; this data centre won't be much closer to Nigeria than European data centres are. Or maybe the double distance, double lag time at South Africa is a bigger reduction to eliminate.

This press release https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-i... says "The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will ... provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa" We can assume that this statement is truer the further south of the Sahara you go ;)

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#32

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

mikorym wrote: post #23
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.

Last time I looked at it, it's the largest industry after the 'adult' industry.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#33

Post by jonathanlydall »

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 experience as possible, with control of their infrastructure being a large part of this, and I would be very surprised to hear this philosophy of theirs has changed.

Then again, I don’t know for sure what they’re doing these days.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#34

Post by ti_ranger »

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.

> 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 of locations (but yes, many in Seattle).

However, all customer EC2 API calls (e.g. the AWS cli's 'aws ec2 run-instances' etc.) are handled by software that is currently developed and maintained by the Cape Town office, and I believe the EC2 parts of the AWS console are also mostly developed in Cape Town.

There are however teams besides EC2 that have developers in Cape Town (e.g. I think the Personal Health Dashboard, which is not EC2-specific, is also developed in Cape Town).

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).

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#35

Post by ti_ranger »

sitepodmatt wrote: post #24
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…

> if major eyeball / gamer ISPs won't peer initially

Almost all the major retail ISPs in South Africa openly peer at NAPAfrica (https://www.napafrica.net/), mainly to pick up Akamai, Google, and more recently CloudFront, but also to bypass expensive local transit costs from the local 'carriers' (Telkom/Openserve, MTN, Vodacom, Internet Solutions etc.).

As far as I know, only the mobile networks (some of whom are building out FTTH networks, but with relatively limited market share) don't openly peer there: - Vodacom - MTN

https://www.napafrica.net/traffic/ NAPAfrica currently does ~500Gbps of traffic. Approx 4 years ago it was ~10Gbps.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#36

Post by ti_ranger »

projectileboy wrote: post #30

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.

> 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, as some other obvious markets that might be a better fit for services they develop would benefit from the region in South Africa.

However, it is quite expensive to operate data centres in Nigeria (as the electrical supply is not very reliable; I know that at least quite recently many DCs there need to run on generator about 10% of the time, I don't know if that has changed since).

There are, however, some initiatives to get more international intra-continental peering going (e.g. I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London).

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#37

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

ti_ranger wrote: post #36
projectileboy wrote: post #30

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.

> 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)

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#38

Post by ma2rten »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #31
projectileboy wrote: post #30

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.

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.

Re: An AWS Region is coming to South Africa

#39

Post by lukeschlather »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #31
projectileboy wrote: post #30

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.

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…

AWS has had an engineering office in South Africa for a very long time. The decision may be more pragmatic than anything.
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