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Comment by wjoe | Hacker News Reader

Yep. We've had to do some work for clients in Africa in my job. One we did in Morocco was fine from EU data centers on AWS, but South Africa has been very difficult to serve with acceptable latency from any data centre we've tried.

We're 90% AWS here, but would probably use Azure for those clients if they had a data centre in that region.

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Some industries flat-out give you issues with moving SA data out, and others have players that are very risk-averse and aren't moving to the cloud.

My day-job is as a consultant in the financial sector. It's been always burdensome getting a project approved where the data will reside outside of the country. We have smaller players , but their rates are exorbitant in comparison to MS, GOOG and Amazon.

I'm glad and optimistic about this move from MS, because now we can get more work done with less red-tape.

UIh, any specific issues? My company will be rolling out SAP from Germany to ZA soonish, and so far we have not yet had a chance to actually really test the connection. Self-hosted data center here, so probably not that comparable. Just overall crappy connection?

My company handles live video streaming, so slow speeds and high latency tends to result in a lot of buffering. You're looking at about 200ms latency minimum from Europe to South Africa, and when you need to download a ~2MB video chunk in 2000ms, it's pretty hard to get a reliable stream, especially when you add in generally slower/less reliable connections along the route.

It can be mitigated somewhat by reducing the quality of the video and using CDNs, but even edge nodes are scarce in that are of the world.

I imagine it would be fine for normal applications, aside from being a little slower, but video is a challenge.

Thanks. We do not serve video, so it is indeed not that comparable. But we do have hosted web applications (SAP CRM), and syncing of offline applications for field staff (technicians) (and that can be quite a lot of data). It seems that our use cases mean either low latency and low bandwidth (non-technical users and their web apps, where "stuff is broken" if it is slow, but they might be already used to that from other areas of their online lifes) OR any latency and high bandwidth (sync doesn't really care if the packages come in with ultra low latency, as long as it syncs). Might work out indeed.

Hetzner South Africa have datacenters in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Their reliability and support is excellent. I am assuming that your services are not limited to cloud VMs and can run on bare metal machines.

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