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.
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...
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.
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 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 ;)
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Things must have changed. I've worked in esports in Australia, and I know that professional OW players use tools to specifically give nearby IP ranges high ping so they can play on the region of their choosing.
AUS players have a jsfiddle they link around which grabs the current IP ranges for AWS so they know what to block to be able to play on NA servers. They do this because the local playerpool is much smaller, to the point where they cannot climb to very high ranks without playing overseas.
Not blizzard specifically, more Activision-blizzard, but the latest call of duty open beta was reportedly running on vultr for at least some of the game servers.
I think they moved it back to in-house servers when it went live, though, and dropped the server rates from 60hz to 20hz. Kind of a shame, the difference was very noticeable.
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 local connectivity itself, if major eyeball / gamer ISPs won't peer initially it might just be as well hosting in nearest Europe region to avoid the double RTL - you see this effect in markets like Singapore with Singtel, Germany with DTAC, and to a degree US with Comcast when server providers pick up local transit from HE/cogent even NTT in some parts - when AWS opened Singapore it was universally terrible routing until they got aggressive about peering and remote peering in the region.
> 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
Yeah, well, it's not as if they couldn't see the total and utter consolidation of cloud and hosting infra coming a mile away. The question was never "if", just "when". Should not be a shock to the local players.
Hopefully they can compete on price. It's like having Google develop a product that competes with you, in that it adds legitimacy to your market. And AWS is known as a feature leader, not a value leader.
There are plenty of organizations that prefer not to host with the PaaS providers, and instead go with traditional hosting providers. Sometimes it co-lo, sometimes it’s for better price/performance for dedicated hosts, and sometimes it’s competitive. Like the others said, this will probably hurt in the short, but help in the long run for these businesses by lending legitimacy and growing the overall space through a significant capital investment.
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/ - Cape Town is at the South-West-most point where all those cables come in )
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.
- 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.
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)
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.
You could do it right now, just shoot some snowball edges into space. You'd have all of the usual space-y problems, but I think edges are being used on tankers and things right now, so the not-always-connected chunk of cloud problem is sovled(ish).
Readit News
I interviewed with Amazon in CT and I regret not accepting the job offer. Seems like that office will really be picking up.
The latency down here is a killer, often 300ms+ to EU/US, and for chatty web apps, a real pain.
What about general telecom infrastructure in SA? Sure, you may have a local AWS DC, but, if everyone's on copper or mobile..
Of course, compared to touching anything across the atlantic, anything local is like lightning.
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...
Compared with the rubbish ADSL we've had to deal with in the past it's day and night.
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 ;)
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.
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).
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)
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.
AUS players have a jsfiddle they link around which grabs the current IP ranges for AWS so they know what to block to be able to play on NA servers. They do this because the local playerpool is much smaller, to the point where they cannot climb to very high ranks without playing overseas.
The comment by Bill Warnecke seems to indicate that some of the Overwatch fleet is hosted on AWS.
I think they moved it back to in-house servers when it went live, though, and dropped the server rates from 60hz to 20hz. Kind of a shame, the difference was very noticeable.
That's one game.
Good news nonetheless, early days though...
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.
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...
Dead Comment
However
1) Johannesburg is inland, the internet backbone cables land at the coast e.g. at Cape Town. ( 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.
- 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
https://www.enca.com/south-africa/crime-stats-reveal-western...
https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/270771/this-is-so...
Isn't Azure supposed to be up this year?
https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/