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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

This is great. SA feels quite far away from the rest of the Internet (think 200ms) so anything that helps improve connectivity is a possive. Especially since this might foreshadow a local data center there. Azure has tech there. Google doesn't. Yet

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From AWS blog:

"(Amazon) will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new Region will be based in Cape Town, will be comprised of three Availability Zones, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in South Africa."

https://aws.amazon.com/es/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-...

Really? Sometimes when there is a problem with out of SA connectivity the only non-local websites that work are Google and YouTube. I’ve got 20ms ping times so Google must have a point of presence in SA.

I am gonna guess he meant a datacenter for Google Cloud. Google probably has their own points-of-presence for Google and YouTube.

Yes, it does, check out the network tab here: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/

They have some sort of caching or CDN yes, but you can't spin up a gcp compute instance for example. Ie far away from a full blown cloud region.

Also the presence of local CDN doesn't imply Google presence. Eg the steam servers in SA are hosted by ISPs

Azure recently opened a datacenter, apparently AWS and GCP do not yet have one.

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsofts-south-african-data-...

We run stuff in a datacenter in Cape Town, and the quality of the connection to our C&C systems in Switzerland is sometimes awful bad - very slow, or routing issues where you have total black holes for minutes. We run similar workloads in the US and Singapore, but international connectivity is nowhere that bad. In spite of this, SA has an excellent tech scene and plenty of talent.

On the other hand, I feel younger seeing transfer rates in tens of kilobytes.... straight out of the roaring 90's.

That seems a little surprising. Certain residential areas in South Africa have gigabit fibre so I'd not expect kilobyte anything and certainly no total black holes from a respectable DC

Just annoyingly high latency and a bit of jitter and shitty pricing on local cloud stuff (though prob better now with azure)

We run lots of DC stuff in Cape Town and the connection to Europe is excellent. Which data center are you using? Something does not sound right here - perhaps faulty hardware, dodgy datacenter or similar. If you want, I can refer you several reputable providers.

"If you want, I can refer you several reputable providers."

In Cape Town? I would have thought the best/only provider would be Hetzner South Africa? If you could recommend more, of similar quality, that would be appreciated.

There are several. Teraco is probably the best, then you have IS, Liquid Telecom, Vox, Hetzner, Vodacom. I think those all have tier 3 DC's in CPT, but you should call them to confirm.

This is going to be a private cable owned entirely by Google. Thus I think the main focus is on providing Google with connectivity for their services. While I would love to think that this will improve connectivity down there to Europe etc. I'm skeptical because it's Google.

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