Hi, I'm the post author. As you guessed, I'm South African. I worked at Amazon in Cape Town in the early days of EC2, and live in Seattle now. A lot of core development on EC2 (and other AWS products) still happens in Cape Town.

The EC2 project was started in Cape Town. Also Amazon's CTO has some links to South Africa (or maybe he is from Amsterdam).

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/

You don't but considering he works for AWS, he was probably a part of the Cape Town AWS team doing EC2 stuff before moving.