
Now Open – AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region - EwanToo
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-africa-cape-town-region/
======
SideburnsOfDoom
You might be wondering "why Cape Town"? when it is right at the bottom of
Africa, and the Southern African business hub is around Johannesburg, 1262 km
/ 784 miles away, and the next area that needs it is Lagos, Nigeria ( 4760 km
/ 2958 miles).

However I think there are some upsides to Cape Town, i.e.

1) AWS already has team and infrastructure there in Cape Town. It is a bit of
a tech hub as well.

2) Submarine cables land in Cape Town - and they cannot in Johannesburg as it
is far inland. By length of internet cable, Cape Town is actually closer than
it seems to other parts of Africa. (a) a lot of the connectivity is around the
coast, not so much over land.

There's probably a shorter ping time between Lagos and Cape Town than there is
between Lagos and Johannesburg, despite the map distances being the other way
around.

3) The further north you go from Cape Town, the closer you are to data centres
in Europe. Cape Town is closest to exactly those parts that are worst served
by Europe.

I have no inside knowledge as to AWS chose Cape Town, but those seem like
likely factors.

a) [https://www.networkplatforms.co.za/information/our-
network](https://www.networkplatforms.co.za/information/our-network)

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Since this got popular and I can't edit any more:

1) Cape Town is not the Southernmost point of Africa, but it is very far
south, and does contain the Cape of Good Hope, the Southwestern-most point.
There are no population centres that are further south (Port Elizabeth is
about the same latitude)

2) "...the next area that needs it is Lagos" ... and other central African
cities such as Kinshasa and Accra. It might make sense if the second African
AWS region is located hereabouts.

3) "... to data centres in Europe" ... and Middle-East, of course.

------
inopinatus
I fell asleep reading this article and had a sort of half dream about a post-
apocalyptic game in which you the amnesiac protagonist (whose initials are
“AZ”) gain consciousness aboard the _MV Dirona_ , and to discover yourself
must awake an ancient demon, a task that actually involves finding and
activating long-lost AWS data centers, solving progressively harder puzzles
using only in-game clues, a voice conferencing service over which a mysterious
and cantankerous but also very tired-sounding voice feeds you tidbits of
cryptic information in a mocking and self-righteous tone, and the gradually
collected pieces of a 20,000 page wiki printout titled “Cold Start of AWS
Region (confidential)” that is only about 80% accurate for each site.

Along the way you discover you are very good at playing yourself at board
games, which is a key mechanic, and your rating improves with each region
successfully started.

Final boss is us-east-1 of course, after which the identity of the “voice”,
and the protagonist, are revealed.

Sort of like Myst, with an inverted Adam and Eve thing going on, and a lot
more JSON.

------
joeraut
This is a great step-up for companies using AWS here in SA.

On a personal note, my latency for my personal site will drop from ~170ms (eu-
west-2) to ~3ms!

~~~
gpm
Edit: I misread, disregard this post

Is us-west really the closest alternative (by ping) to South Africa? Naively I
would have expected one in Europe to be closer.

~~~
gabagool
You may have misread, they used to use EU-west-2 (London).

~~~
gpm
Oops... you're right. Thanks.

------
hendry
They must have had to do extra work to cover for the failing South African
electricity supply.

Awesome news as a South African. Guess Amazon's network blows away TENET? ;)

~~~
Havoc
I'd imagine they'd stick the datacenter somewhere that doesn't get regularly
blackouts. I don't think you'd want to use generators that often

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> Africa (Cape Town) is the 23rd AWS Region, and the first one in Africa. It
> is comprised of three Availability Zones

That means 3 data centres.

~~~
inopinatus
A common misconception, but no, AWS AZs are not DCs. A single AZ may be
composed of multiple data centers[1], and a region may incorporate facilities
that do not serve a public AZ[2], or that supply other capabilities[3].

[1] They'd be necessarily close together due to speed-of-light constraints.

[2] You may infer this from S3's triple-zone replication, which is still
somehow magically fulfilled in regions that only have two public AZs.

[3] most obviously, Direct Connect.

~~~
mjlee
To clarify, it means at least 3 DCs per AWS documentation.

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-
infrastructure/regio...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-
infrastructure/regions_az/)

~~~
darkwater
Oh, very nice link, thanks!

> AZ’s are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers,
> from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other.

This answers my previous question I guess

EDIT: well, actually, no. I wanted to know distance between DC in the same AZ
:)

~~~
EwanToo
If you really want to know, you can look it up on wikileaks

[https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/map/](https://wikileaks.org/amazon-
atlas/map/)

------
becauseiam
Every time a new AWS region is made public, it continues to highlight the
disparity in services availability across the regions, as well as making
information about services available. Many regions are "discovered" because
the ip-regions.json file is updated long before the press release, but it will
be some weeks to months before key information needed to spin up
infrastructure appears in documentation, for example things like the ELB
hosted zone identifier, which at time of writing is not documented.

~~~
jeffbarr
> things like the ELB hosted zone identifier

If you file a ticket on the proper page, I am sure that my colleagues will fix
it ASAP. Go to the page and click "Provide feedback."

~~~
becauseiam
To extend what I'm trying to say is that customers shouldn't have to do this
and that updating of this data (which ideally should be in a machine readable
format, much like ip-ranges.json) is just another step. I would like to hope
that AWS already has playbooks for taking a region out of closed-beta and
making it GA. If the listing of af-south-1 is already present on other
sections of documentation this may already be the case.

I'll send the feedback through anyhow.

~~~
xchaotic
Show me that magic unicorn company that spins data centres like that with 0
documentation bugs and I’ll join you criticising them. As it stands with
limited resources I am pretty impressed with the speed AWS keeps adding
capacity around the world.

~~~
reaperducer
Provide a service, or don't. It's sad that we've been trained to think that
screw-ups are normal and OK.

~~~
marcinzm
Screw-ups will happen no matter how much wishful thinking and effort is spent
preventing them. If you assume perfection in things then you will be sorely
disappointed by most everything.

------
whitehouse3
I know Epic Games uses AWS for their Fortnite matchmaking servers. And an
African region has been a long-time player request. Maybe those wishes will be
fulfilled soon.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
It's a new data-centre. How does that have a bearing on the way Epic manage
their matchmaking? Matchmaking isn't latency-sensitive, is it?

~~~
Qwuke
My South African cousins have desperately wanted an African Fortnite server.
When playing on EU servers their latency was around 200ms on a good day iirc.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Oh, right. That's not a matchmaking server then, that's a dedicated
multiplayer game server. Matchmaking is, to use Wikipedia's definition, _the
process of connecting players together for online play sessions_.

~~~
tsukurimashou
in modern games matchmaking = game servers

which can be confusing

in a lot of games you cannot see a server list anymore, you can only use
matchmaking (usually casual / ranked) and the matchmaking handles spinning up
servers depending on the load.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
They're still not the same service. Matchmaking is about grouping people
together for the game, presumably dependent on their geographical location
(for latency) and their skill-level (to balance the game), etc. Dedicated game
servers, on the other hand, host the actual multiplayer session.

It's similar to the distinction Netflix uses between their control plane
(hosted on AWS) and their content-delivery (hosted on their 'Open Connect'
CDN).

~~~
tsukurimashou
Oh I agree on the terminology, and I think it's a shame things are how they
are (no more active community on games like we see with 2000s games). I was
just pointing out that it was so common these days that people mean "game
servers" when they say "matchmaking".

------
kolikotime
Awesome news, especially for gaming on the continent. I won't lie, AWS Cape
Town is kind of a dream gig for African technologists.

~~~
curiousgal
No it's not, if I'm based in Tunisia for example, why would I pick that region
over one in Europe?

~~~
sgt
Tunisia is practically Europe.

~~~
curiousgal
That's my point. It makes no sense to talk about "Africa".

------
numbsafari
Of the big public cloud providers, Microsoft came to Africa first.

As far as I know, GCP doesn’t have anything on the roadmap for Africa.

~~~
x86_64Ubuntu
Why would GCP expand when they are looking to kill the product offering?

~~~
karambahh
Can you elaborate on this?

I've never heard before that they are trying to kill GCP?

~~~
sah2ed
Perhaps they are basing it on this [1] ultimatum supposedly issued by GCP’s
top brass to best the top 2 cloud providers by a certain date. It was widely
discussed on HN some months ago.

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260)

~~~
res0nat0r
Yeah that conversation was pretty silly and more HN echo chamber because folks
are mad that Google Reader was shutdown. Below is what I commented a few
months ago re: this topic.

> Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of
> Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud
> offering buildout this year alone.

> [https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/google-data-center-
> nevada/](https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/google-data-center-nevada/)

>
> [https://www.rgj.com/story/money/business/2019/02/13/google-i...](https://www.rgj.com/story/money/business/2019/02/13/google-i..).

------
1290cc
The AWS EC2 service was invented in Cape Town, AWS already have a lab and
infrastructure there so its easier for them to scale up infrastructure when
the people, skills and local ecosystem is already present.

------
xvilka
I hope they will consider creating a new region also in Lagos, Nigeria. It's
the booming[1] megalopolis and biggest city in Africa.

[1] [https://www.brinknews.com/this-country-recently-became-
afric...](https://www.brinknews.com/this-country-recently-became-africas-
largest-economy-now-its-too-big-for-businesses-to-ignore/)

------
cbg0
Azure bandwidth out of their Africa datacenters is $0.181 per GB, while AWS is
$0.154 per GB, will be interesting to see if this forces Azure prices down.

------
possibleworlds
From memory the initial development on AWS was actually done in South Africa.
Yup, here we go...
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Servi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Services)

------
SideburnsOfDoom
Also

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943445)

and

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943674)

------
WilliamEdward
Cape Town is becoming a serious tech hub

~~~
ignoramous
Fwiw, EC2 was founded in Cape Town and continues to have a big presence to
date. Later, the founding team built Nimbula, kind of DC/OS of the time.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/nimbula_cloud_os/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/nimbula_cloud_os/)

Also see:
[http://www.adccpt.com/#/challenges](http://www.adccpt.com/#/challenges)

~~~
cpach
Cool! Had no clue that it was.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#History)

~~~
NikolaeVarius
The source is dead. I thought wikipedia would be better about that

~~~
hk__2
> The source is dead. I thought wikipedia would be better about that

You could have fixed it instead of writing such comment. Wikipedia is nothing
without the thousands of volunteers writing (and fixing!) content on it.

------
k__
I would have expected they open up one in Lagos.

------
kylehotchkiss
I wonder if this will improve international connectivity times once Cape
Town's Cloudfront is warmed up since the underseas cables wouldn't need to
carry as many CDNed assets due to new region presence.

------
TeslaRoadster2
Does anyone know how this will affect the water issues that Cape Town have
been having? As far as I know, Cape Town's 'Zero Day' is still something
people are cognizant of.

~~~
TheCapeGreek
Not really actually. The drought ended. It does go in some regular cycles if
you look at the historical dam water levels. Currently were out of the bad
times, but efforts need to be scaled up to be ready for next time. Politically
speaking this won't happen though.

In terms of climate, CPT is basically a more windy Los Angeles/SF.

------
Havoc
Nice. Some competition for Azure.

------
RocketSyntax
Ooo I wonder if this will be the standard for African EHR and PHI

