Cloud usage in South Africa

[joeyhza]

Brilliant response there psypher246.

Admittedly, I have been out the loop WRT anything AWS for quite some time and based my response on my limited knowledge of AWS going on my outdated experience.

Seems I have some catching up to do on that front. You've certainly highlighted some amazing points to consider. Thanks

 

[psypher246]

Brilliant response there psypher246.

Admittedly, I have been out the loop WRT anything AWS for quite some time and based my response on my limited knowledge of AWS going on my outdated experience.

Seems I have some catching up to do on that front. You've certainly highlighted some amazing points to consider. Thanks

Cool! Glad to clear that up. I'm not trying to downplay Azure's services. Like I said I have no experience there, so I defer to others' experience, just trying to show people in SA that there is much more to AWS than some think.

Also if you are a big MS user, you should check out the AWS Directory Service, Workspaces and Workspaces Application Manager. You can auto add new instances to the Directory Services upon launch which i think is quite a nifty feature if you need AD integration. Some limitations as it's SAMBA4 under the hood and not full Windows AD, it and join a full AD though.

And again, do check out the link I shared above with the microservices. If you have any Javascript/java skills, lambda is amazing and possibly gamechanging.

 

[biometrics]

Very happy with Rackspace.

They claim "100% Network Uptime Guarantee".

 

[ActivateD]

I am working in the enterprise space and you be surprised on some big names that are testing or using Azure services and Office365.

Yeah a lot of clients are moving to Office365 and Azure. Last year I installed at least 10 Storsimple devices and installed and configured at least 20 office365 for clients. MS SA is really pushing this in SA.

 

[Dolby]

Thanks - what services are you using and what sort of latency are you experiencing?

I know real world O365 solutions running Riverbed are experience 80+% bandwidth reduction and a perceived 20x speed increase - fact. The 'brochure' says one can expect 90%+ and up to 30x.

The 'negative' with the solution is 50+ licences will make it worthwhile

EDIT : For the guys installing O365 for clients, why don't you propose Riverbed solutions to see what they can do for them? No obligation POC to see how it works out.

 

[PsYTraNc3]

South Africans are too cheap to pay for a good quality service.

I work for a Norwegian company that offers 97% guaranteed up-time on a hybrid\cloud solution and sticks to it.
Loads of customers all around the world uses our services to host their entire platform and are very happy with it.

Tried launching the same thing in SA with R2 million worth of hardware and a sales team of 6 people but that never lasted long
People kept wanting discounts and stripped down services to make it fit their IT budget which in SA is way too low for most companies.

Why do we need redundancy?
why do we need backup?
No I don't want my email hosted on your exchange. there are cheaper options.
What if I don't have my files on your environment and keep them locally instead?

^^ Some of the questions that the sales people were asked

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

We just started using AWS for production sites now. No problems so far. Basically everything under one roof, except our secondary backups which will be done elsewhere (primary backups to S3 though).

 

[n473]

We use AWS, though it's worth noting that our entire infrastructure is Linux-based, save for one or two MS SQL RDS instances.

Honestly I've been utterly blown away by my experience with AWS. We've got a bunch of Tomcat web services running in AutoScaling Groups, with the whole thing being orchestrated by Ansible and Packer.

I'm using Packer with Ansible playbooks to automate building Amazon Machine Images, which are then passed to Ansible Tower, which creates all the infrastructure around the services and creates Launch Configurations for each AMI. With a single command, I'm able to go from nothing to 10+ AutoScaling Groups, Route53 DNS, full VPC configuration with multiple priv/pub subnets, and then some. Whenever we do a new release, we build a new AMI, replace that service's Launch Configuration, and systematically drain connections and terminate existing instances, having the ASG automatically repopulate with instances built from the new AMI. Literally a zero-downtime release.

And the best part is, I know we're barely scraping at the surface of what AWS is capable of.

In terms of latency, we're using Ireland (eu-west-1), which averages around 200-400ms. It's not ideal, but you can get Amazon Direct Connect through Layer 3 if you're willing to fork out the cash for a connection to the Dark Fibre Africa loop.

 

[herbertk]

Using AWS extensively for work and personal.

 

[hammell]

We use AWS, though it's worth noting that our entire infrastructure is Linux-based, save for one or two MS SQL RDS instances.

Honestly I've been utterly blown away by my experience with AWS. We've got a bunch of Tomcat web services running in AutoScaling Groups, with the whole thing being orchestrated by Ansible and Packer.

I'm using Packer with Ansible playbooks to automate building Amazon Machine Images, which are then passed to Ansible Tower, which creates all the infrastructure around the services and creates Launch Configurations for each AMI. With a single command, I'm able to go from nothing to 10+ AutoScaling Groups, Route53 DNS, full VPC configuration with multiple priv/pub subnets, and then some. Whenever we do a new release, we build a new AMI, replace that service's Launch Configuration, and systematically drain connections and terminate existing instances, having the ASG automatically repopulate with instances built from the new AMI. Literally a zero-downtime release.

And the best part is, I know we're barely scraping at the surface of what AWS is capable of.

In terms of latency, we're using Ireland (eu-west-1), which averages around 200-400ms. It's not ideal, but you can get Amazon Direct Connect through Layer 3 if you're willing to fork out the cash for a connection to the Dark Fibre Africa loop.

Have you looked at CodeDeploy?

 

[n473]

Have you looked at CodeDeploy?

I haven't looked into it in-depth, but I intend to. We've decided to start moving to EC2 Container Service, so right now I'm focusing on Dockerizing everything. I've just moved our binary store to S3, so I'm interested to possibly tie CodeDeploy into that. Have you used it at all? I'm trying to see what benefits it has over just using something like Jenkins.