
An AWS Region is coming to South Africa - tnolet
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-is-coming-to-south-africa.html
======
improbable22
Worth mentioning perhaps that some stages in the invention of AWS happened
there, at a safe distance from the mothership:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Services)

~~~
hacknat
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.

~~~
donretag
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.

~~~
ti_ranger
> 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).

~~~
philwelch
> 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.

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grandinj
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.

~~~
rootsudo
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..

~~~
mikorym
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...

~~~
zamalek
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.

~~~
mikorym
On the fibre topic: That's interesting, I know the regulations are backward
thinking in relation to the EU, but I would have thought fibre would be more
widespread.

How have you found the move, work wise? My impression in JHB is that core
economic activity is suffering (e.g., contruction) but people with mathsy or
programming qualifications get jobs easily. Case in point: I have a
Mathematics MSc and can get a job very easily; however, a Biology MSc looking
for an environmental job simply does not. Any area that requires govt input of
course will be less focused on quality and integrity of work.

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projectileboy
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.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
The backbone topology is mapped here
[https://www.submarinecablemap.com/](https://www.submarinecablemap.com/)

I linked to it in this comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18300309](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...](https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2018/10/an-aws-region-is-
coming-to-south-africa.html) 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 ;)

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ma2rten
_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.

~~~
sangnoir
> 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](https://www.liquidtelecom.com/about-us/network-map.html)

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

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

~~~
sangnoir
Yes, it's fairly new. The build-out was done in the last ~ 3-5 years, but it
was only lit in stages within the past 2 years.

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andkenneth
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.

~~~
jonathanlydall
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.

~~~
bsagdiyev
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.

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lgleason
I feel bad for all of the local providers down there such as Afrihost,
CloudAfrica etc.. Big companies pushing out the little guys sadly...

~~~
nsomaru
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...

~~~
Scarbutt
You can use AWS as a simple DO but it will probably be more costly.

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SideburnsOfDoom
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.submarinecablemap.com/](https://www.submarinecablemap.com/) \-
Cape Town is at the South-West-most point where all those cables come in )

2) AWS already has an operation in Cape Town.

~~~
throwaway34re3
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.

~~~
mikorym
\- Cape Town murder rates are higher than JHB (attributed partly to Cape Flats
vs. Soweto, the latter which is a much better place to live now).

\- JHB theft rates I think are higher than Cape Town.

There are some statistics about this, but generally they show that CT is worse
than _some_ people think and JHB slightly better than people think. At least,
from your comment, we can infer that _some_ people seem to have the CT-is-
good-vs-JHB-is-bad impression.

Personally, I prefer not to flash about statistics. The only thing that I
_will_ say is that former township areas in JHB are improving compared to
areas like Khayalitsha and the Cape Flats. I do think that culture wise, Cape
Town has a lot going for it; in JHB, the only thing still needed is an Eiffel
Tower. It is not an uglier city than Paris, but it is not (yet) a tourist
destination.

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laichzeit0
But only in 2020...

Isn't Azure supposed to be up this year?

~~~
tnolet
yeah, it's on their regions map [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-
infrastructure/regi...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-
infrastructure/regions/)

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01100011
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)?

~~~
joncrane
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.

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somanyquestions
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?

~~~
myroon5
Not exactly what you're looking for, but this might help:
[https://www.cloudping.co](https://www.cloudping.co)

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nostrebored
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.

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tnolet
This is great news. I've had multiple customers request DC locations in South
Africa for my monitoring service
[https://checklyhq.com](https://checklyhq.com). Also in general a nice boost
for the underserved ZA Saas market.

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moltar
Exciting times!

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StreamBright
Thailand when?

