AWS launches EDGE locations in SA!

[Praemon]

AWS has launched an EDGE location in Johannesburg, with Cape Town going live in the coming weeks. Hopefully this is a good indication that AWS will offer full services in South Africa in the near future.

Source: https://techcentral.co.za/amazon-web-services-sets-up-sa-points-of-presence/81882/

Edit: Here's the official announcement - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/06/cloudfront-expands-into-africa/

Pricing - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ (we're mid-tier in terms of pricing, which isn't bad)

 

[Rickster]

Does this mean local PUBG servers?

 

[Praemon]

Does this mean local PUBG servers?

Unfortunately not. They need to launch a full data center before all services are available, but it's a step in the right direction. But doesn't PUBG use Azure? We're getting local Azure servers later this year.

 

[Rickster]

Unfortunately not. They need to launch a full data center before all services are available, but it's a step in the right direction. But doesn't PUBG use Azure? We're getting local Azure servers later this year.

I heard they use Azure for console platforms and AWS for PC.

 

[Praemon]

I heard they use Azure for console platforms and AWS for PC.

Ah, okay. Wonder why they split it like that. Well, hopefully AWS come to the party with full services, as lots of games and online services would benefit from local data centers.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Ah, okay. Wonder why they split it like that. Well, hopefully AWS come to the party with full services, as lots of games and online services would benefit from local data centers.

Well their console effort is exclusive to Microsoft which is an Azure platform tied to Xbox Live.

 

[Praemon]

Well their console effort is exclusive to Microsoft which is an Azure platform tied to Xbox Live.

Yeah, just thought it would be easier to manage one hosting platform across all game platforms. I guess because they launched on PC first they would have already got it working on AWS, and then did a separate setup for the Xbox port.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Yeah, just thought it would be easier to manage one hosting platform across all game platforms. I guess because they launched on PC first they would have already got it working on AWS, and then did a separate setup for the Xbox port.

I believe Microsoft makes it very simple to integrate with Xbox Live hosting and it's almost automated so probably not that much effort on their part.

Being a headliner for MS wouldn't be surprised if they even had someone from Microsoft side do all the work for them.

 

[Praemon]

So I thought I'd provide some feedback after trying out some of AWS' services. While the local EDGE locations for Cloudfront is great, I was really interested in the fact that AWS also announced that services like Route53, Lambda@EDGE and WAF (Web Application Firewall) will be able to take advantage of the local Cloudfront EDGE locations.

To get WAF working, I went the route of setting up Cloudfront in front of a dynamic website. As expected, static content was cached at local POPs, and the speed improvements are significant thanks to that. However, I noticed very slow speeds (1,200 - 2,000 ms) on dynamic content or content that's set to non-cacheable. At first I thought it was a setup issue, however, after posting in Reddit and the AWS forums, the issue has been found: AWS routes non-cached items via London!

So with Cloudfront there's local EDGE POPs (CPT and JHB), but then they use a "Regional Edge" location for checking and pulling content from the origin source (ie. your website). For some reason AWS have not setup a South African Regional Edge service, so it uses the closest one: London. This means that if content is not cached, and your origin is in South Africa, then there are multiple round trips between London and South Africa before serving the content, which adds anywhere from 1,000 - 1,800ms. In a real-word production environment, that's just unacceptable.

Overall it's disappointing that AWS has gone this route, and I guess we'll have to wait until they deploy a proper AWS service in the next few years to use these additional services.

TL;DR: AWS has deployed a partial Cloudfront setup in South Africa, which makes it pretty much useless for anything other than static content caching.

 

[ranger]

They need to launch a full data center before all services are available, but it's a step in the right direction.

AWS doesn't do "Data Centers" as a customer visible architecture, but multi-AZ regions (by comparison, Azure currently only has 2 multi-AZ regions). If you look at the wikileaks leak on Amazon data centers, you will notice that there are often more data centers than AZs.

I guess we'll have to wait until they deploy a proper AWS service in the next few years to use these additional services.

A full 3-AZ AWS region for South Africa (Cape Town) has now been announced. I created a separate thread about it.