Amazon opening data centres in South Africa

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Amazon opening data centres in South Africa

Amazon has announced that Amazon Web Services will open data centres in South Africa.

The new AWS Infrastructure Region, opening in the first half of 2020, will “enable customers to run workloads in South Africa and serve end-users across the African continent with even lower latency”, said Amazon.
 
Johnatan56 said:
My only problem with AWS is the only 1 year free tier. I am still messing around with it, but I am not going to pay for my ~600 units of text for the comprehend service.
Amazon Lambda being free for under 1 million calls is nice though.
View attachment 569021
Thanks for letting me use it for my Android back-end for test stuff: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with-on-demand-custom-android.html
Click to expand...

There's a 12month option and an Always Free option, with lower limits:

https://aws.amazon.com/free/?nc2=h_ql_pr&awsf.Free Tier Types=categories#alwaysfree
 
Budza said:
There's a 12month option and an Always Free option, with lower limits:

https://aws.amazon.com/free/?nc2=h_ql_pr&awsf.Free Tier Types=categories#alwaysfree
Click to expand...
Yeah, Lambda is permanently free, but e.g. Comprehend is not, only 1 year after sign-up. The other worry I have is that one can't set it to permanently 0 budget, so if you accidentally go over, bad luck to you rather than having a cut-off option, only option is one cent which is a bit annoying.
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EDIT:
Currently in my one project I am using Lambda, Comprehend and DynamoDB without costs, which is nice.

Still want to try out the Google Cloud alternative as well. https://cloud.google.com/free/
Double the amount of Google Cloud Function calls (doesn't really matter, I don't come close to the AWS Lambda limits), but they have 5k free units of Google Cloud Natural Language on the free tier forever, plus the Google Cloud speech API for 60 minutes a month, which I also want to mess with.

BigQuery is also quite interesting: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/try-google-bigquery-today-now-with-10gb-of-free-storage
My current datasets are tiny, so easily fits in the limit.
 
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Been sitting on this info for months if not possibly a year while Amazon was ****ing around trying to make their minds up.

Glad it's finally public knowledge.

The "shithole" country is getting a major step up and amazingly they still are still beating Azure I reckon.
 
2020? Lol. So much might happen in SA before 2020. I'm vaguely surprised they're making such a long term commitment in an environment with such unstable prospects.
 
garp said:
2020? Lol. So much might happen in SA before 2020. I'm vaguely surprised they're making such a long term commitment in an environment with such unstable prospects.
Click to expand...

Well given that they have made a VERY long term play in CPT with their offices, it makes sense to have a DC in a similar location as well, esp since Africa is crying out for "local" cloud services.
 
garp said:
2020? Lol. So much might happen in SA before 2020. I'm vaguely surprised they're making such a long term commitment in an environment with such unstable prospects.
Click to expand...

You could see it on the flip side...maybe the prospects aren't as unstable as you think they are if companies like them are willing to invest in it?

They've also been at planning this for the last two years and actively so for the last year.

It's actually quite laughable that it's only happening now considering the product was created here and is supported from here primarily.
 
ToxicBunny said:
Well given that they have made a VERY long term play in CPT with their offices, it makes sense to have a DC in a similar location as well, esp since Africa is crying out for "local" cloud services.
Click to expand...

This is exactly it.

It's not just a South Africa play, it's a Gateway to Africa play.
 
SauRoNZA said:
You could see it on the flip side...maybe the prospects aren't as unstable as you think they are if companies like them are willing to invest in it?

They've also been at planning this for the last two years and actively so for the last year.

It's actually quite laughable that it's only happening now considering the product was created here and is supported from here primarily.
Click to expand...

If one looks at the Macro scale of things, many big companies are still investing here, though maybe not to the level we would like.

Hell the scale of construction in CPT, DBN and JHB is still at a ridiculous level...
 
SauRoNZA said:
The "shithole" country is getting a major step up and amazingly they still are still beating Azure I reckon.
Click to expand...

Beating them in what way? Azure centers are already built in both Cape Town and JHB with some customer testing already underway and pretty close to go live last I heard.

Great news for us to have Amazon join the party as well.
 
ToxicBunny said:
I still think Azure will be first to market with a proper DC offering though....
Click to expand...

But, not first with a proper (aka multi-AZ) region. Azure only has 4 of those.

Also, AFAIK, Azure is just hosting in existing DCs, not building their own (like AWS is).
 
ranger said:
But, not first with a proper (aka multi-AZ) region. Azure only has 4 of those.

Also, AFAIK, Azure is just hosting in existing DCs, not building their own (like AWS is).
Click to expand...

Yeah for sure...

Though with how quiet MS has been on the Azure front, it wouldn't surprise me if they're building DC's somewhere in SA currently and are just launching a co-located option for now...
 
SauRoNZA said:
Been sitting on this info for months if not possibly a year while Amazon was ****ing around trying to make their minds up.
Click to expand...

As far as I know (I know some of the people involved):
* you couldn't have known about it for more than the past 11 months
* AWS wasn't trying to make up their minds about if/whether, but only when (apparently the drought played a role here too, apparently they didn't think it was right to announce a new source of water consumption at the height of a drought).
 
ranger said:
As far as I know (I know some of the people involved):
* you couldn't have known about it for more than the past 11 months
* AWS wasn't trying to make up their minds about if/whether, but only when (apparently the drought played a role here too, apparently they didn't think it was right to announce a new source of water consumption at the height of a drought).
Click to expand...

Known about it since the very first moment it went out to contractors, can’t remember the exact timeline.

Feels longer than 11 months but not going to go double check just for an internet pissing contest.

Water was a big part of the problem but not for any moral high ground on their part but rather wanting to play cloak and dagger with their nonsense to get water use licenses etc approved.
 
grapjas said:
Beating them in what way? Azure centers are already built in both Cape Town and JHB with some customer testing already underway and pretty close to go live last I heard.

Great news for us to have Amazon join the party as well.
Click to expand...

It’s just that they’ve been in testing and go live forever and also just limited services.

Also not their own DC’s so pretty small scale in contrast.

But hopefully this news makes them move faster to be first out the door.
 
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