This is essentially why my company doesn't target African markets, because our software requires a persistent internet connection.
As of time of writing it's a tough proposition.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Cable_ma...
http://www.eassy.org/network_overview.html
There's DC facilities there as well:
http://telecoms.com/180712/east-africa-opens-monster-datacen...
I understand there are worse places in Afrika, but for me that makes Kenya a proper shithole.
But as a retort, in America, gay and trans people get denied rights and are killed everyday because they are "an abomination to god". Women are denied medican support by old white men who know what's best for them. Black people get killed by the police with no recourse. There is human trafficking that goes unaddressed because our economy is basically built on it. There is a horribly stratified economy, and a horrible opioid (and in my opinion, alchohol) epidemic...
But keep living in your shell man.
That may all well be true, but it doesn't change the fact that Kenya - as it is now - is not a country I would build a datacenter in. I don't have to go to Kenya myself to know if it is a backwards country or not. The facts are the facts.
I don't have to experience something to know anything about it. I'll make my opinion from a far from statistics that have no correlation to whether a datacenter could actually thrive in Kenya.
First of all, I reject the notion that only first hand experiences are a valid way of forming opinions. In fact I would argue that statistics and facts are better than feelings and impressions for making business decisions in basically every single way.
Second, I never said a datacenter wouldn't thrive in Kenya. It probably would, as Afrika is in dire need of a datacenter, which is the context of this thread. That said, I wouldn't build a datacenter in Kenya, because I - in contrast to your assertion that Kenya isn't "the backwoods that the west thinks it is" - think that the facts conclusively prove that Kenya is, in fact, a shithole.
Other countries (like America) may have their problems, but not at this scale and severity.
You've cherry picked problems, that you have no actual knowledge of, comment on the "scale and severity", and say that those problems disqualify Kenya from having hosting an AWS data center. However, the problems of other countries (the US, China, Brazil) don't disqualify them. Not to mention that there are other data centers in Kenya, which seem to operate just fine.
I assume that you think that Amazon would be clearing parts of the African Serengeti and protecting it's racks from lions, wildebeest and tribesmen.
In reality, they would buy real estate in Nairobi like every other major company.
>>>But keep living in your shell man.
And I assume you think of me as some kind of idiot. Of course I understand that Kenya is not as you just said, but I consider Kenya an underdeveloped country that does not have its act together. I really don't see how you can argue against that based on facts.
Women do get medical support, maybe not enough, it's not true that all women are denied medical support.
Yes, America is not a utopia, but it's not as bad as you paint it.
What does this even mean?
> Yes, America is not a utopia, but it's not as bad as you paint it.
And my point was that the same could be said for Kenya, if you knew anything about it.
It's easy to cherry pick facts to make a country look terrible.
I don't have to cherry pick facts to make Kenya look bad, I just picked a bunch of pretty bad ones about Kenya to illustrate my point.
I also find it telling that, instead of cherry picking positive things about Kenya to disprove my point, posters in this thread resorted Whataboutisms with respect to the US.
I really don't like being in this thread, arguing viewpoints that I myself consider borderline bigotry, but the notion that Kenya is somehow on par with the US or even any other developed nation is preposterous.
I absolutely agree than Kenya and the USA are not "on par" with each other; but before jumping from that to describing Kenya as "a proper shithole" I'd want to talk to Kenyans and find out how Kenya measures up under their standards.
No offense to you or Israel, but it would be nice to see African interests managed somewhat "locally" whenever possible, with the benefits accrued and distributed locally as well. I think that's a future many people hope for, and it's nice to see an effort towards that direction where possible.
* Biggest problem is that Israel is an Internet cul-de-sac - there aren't any overland Internet links to Arab countries because of politics. Which means that the only people who are going to get great pings are Israelis.
* Sure, there are a ton of Israeli tech companies, but if they're going to spin up instances in an Israeli region, they're going to be low-traffic/requirement dev instances. Production instances are going to be located close to customers, and almost no Israeli tech companies sell to the tiny local market.
* Israeli customs infrastructure has a long way to go before it's probably reliable enough for Amazon to risk investment. Imagine a vital shipment of server hardware getting held up at Ashdod because Histadrut went on strike.... shudder
I refuse to believe that the bean counters at Amazon are ignorant - they've more probably come to the conclusion that it's just not profitable.
To find out where the next AWS regions are going, go to wikipedia and sort countries by GDP, any large country without a region is a target. Obviously there is some massaging happening, like AWS is considering all the nordic countries near Sweden.
Another thing would be if AWS started building smaller regions with only 1 DC. Right now a region requires at least 3 DCs with the AZ model... so that's a lot of capacity to fill.