An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
allthingsdistributed.com
allthingsdistributed.com
I interviewed with Amazon in CT and I regret not accepting the job offer. Seems like that office will really be picking up.
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).
Legacy of the empire--there's almost always an English-speaking population in normal business hours.
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.
Compared with the rubbish ADSL we've had to deal with in the past it's day and night.
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...
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.
But this would mean I have a data-only mobile contract, right?
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.
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.
Good point. I haven't found a lot of resource on this topic. The exception, which discusses the growth of terrestrial networks is this:
http://www.africabandwidthmaps.com/?p=5505 e.g.
> Of the total activated/ sold bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 3.065 Tbps (92.3%) was supplied directly by submarine cable.
> Of the total bandwidth of 3.319 Tbps in Sub-Saharan Africa by December 2016, 248 Gbps (7.5%) was supplied by terrestrial cross-border networks connected to submarine cables. The completion of new cross-border links, and the expansion of capacity on others, has seen the volume of intra-regional traffic backhauled to submarine cable landing points increase by 65% in the last year
I note also this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301912
> I believe at present most traffic between Nigeria and South Africa transits London
Simply, the network is at present not optimised for traffic between e.g. Johannesburg and Lagos. Why would it be? There's not a lot of it. An internet user in Johannesburg is mostly either going to look at domestic websites in SA, or the "top 1000" sites, hosted in EU and USA.
I hope that this will change over time, and better data centres in Africa is part of that.
If internet traffic is anything like road traffic then the presence of a highway would generate more traffic. Having a crappy connection pretty much guarantees that there is little traffic!
In reality everything goes via the submarine cables though. It's easier than fighting through the landrights of 6,000 miles of sometimes shaky countries.
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
> covering Africa's fastest-growing economies, where no fixed network has ever existed before.
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)
> Electrical supply in Cape Town has had issues too: https://www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+load+shedding
Oh wow, one day of residential load shedding in the past year.
Nigeria had a country-wide electrical outage this year: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/254308-updated...
A few years ago, I was somewhat involved with some data centres in Nigeria, which ran on generators 2-3 times a day for at last an hour each time, every day, for more than a year, due to the electrical grid in the city (Lagos) going down. The locals indicated that this was normal (e.g. had been like this for years).
Ghana has much more reliable electricity than Nigeria.
A few more articles:
http://dailypost.ng/2018/07/24/nigeria-may-not-stable-power-...
https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-challenge-keepi...
"To cope with the frequent blackouts and lack of access, a quarter of Nigerians relied on generators in 2016"
South Africa's electricity generation (Eskom) has problems, but nothing like Nigeria's (yet).
That's one game.
The largest game, by a large margin.
I attribute my slightly better English vocabulary to Diablo 2 and other games of that time.
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 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.
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.
The comment by Bill Warnecke seems to indicate that some of the Overwatch fleet is hosted on AWS.
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.
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...
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.
Isn't Azure supposed to be up this year?
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?