Coming in 2018 – New AWS Region in Sweden | Hacker News Reader

Coming in 2018 – New AWS Region in Sweden

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188 pointsalecsx676 comments

When will Africa get a region?

Seriously, we have companies willing to pay big money to use a region closer to us.

Where would you propose hosting it in Africa? I understand that the consumer internet situation is not very good over there, are there datacenters and strong fiber links to USA and Europe?

This is essentially why my company doesn't target African markets, because our software requires a persistent internet connection.

Dubai. Yes, not actually in Africa, but much closer to the area and relatively stable. Also, there's plenty of activity going on in the Middle East that would justify this (I think).

That's a nonstarter because of UAE's requirements on censorship and backdoored surveillance ("lawful intercept"). They're at least on the level of China in this regard, maybe even worse.

Aws Beijing exists

And is used only by the Chinese and Chinese serving companies... The interests of the continent of Africa are not the same as those in the UAE... nor should they be.

Data centres aren't the same thing as "the available consumer internet" but yes, I take your point. That said, if there's any country that could find a practical compromise on that front, it would be the UAE, and they're in a very natural location close to many undersea cables, etc.

There are other options in the middle east, like Bahrain.

It's similarly bad:

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/bahrain

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/united-arab...

Dubai and the Arab Emirates censor and filter the internet, I don't think that would work.

There is good fiber in East Africa, its been there for a few years now:

http://www.eassy.org/network_overview.html

There's DC facilities there as well:

http://telecoms.com/180712/east-africa-opens-monster-datacen...

South Africa has good and stable fiber links. It would be the natural choice.

That's where EC2 was invented and developed, too!

East Africa, maybe Kenya.

Why not Israel? * We have multiple fiber links * A lot of AWS heavy workloads comes from Israeli companies * Easy connection to other location through Egypt and Jordan

Why not Africa for Africa. Infrastructure for Africans. Jobs for Africans, network effects as technology use and extension takes off and salaries rise and hopefully lift up those who can't take direct part in the digital economy yet.

No offense to you or Israel, but it would be nice to see African interests managed somewhat "locally" whenever possible, with the benefits accrued and distributed locally as well. I think that's a future many people hope for, and it's nice to see an effort towards that direction where possible.

As much as I'd personally love for an AWS region to be built in Israel, the fact of the matter is, Israel is a poor development target for AWS.

* Biggest problem is that Israel is an Internet cul-de-sac - there aren't any overland Internet links to Arab countries because of politics. Which means that the only people who are going to get great pings are Israelis.

* Sure, there are a ton of Israeli tech companies, but if they're going to spin up instances in an Israeli region, they're going to be low-traffic/requirement dev instances. Production instances are going to be located close to customers, and almost no Israeli tech companies sell to the tiny local market.

* Israeli customs infrastructure has a long way to go before it's probably reliable enough for Amazon to risk investment. Imagine a vital shipment of server hardware getting held up at Ashdod because Histadrut went on strike.... shudder

I refuse to believe that the bean counters at Amazon are ignorant - they've more probably come to the conclusion that it's just not profitable.

Israels economy is too small to justify an AWS region (yet).

To find out where the next AWS regions are going, go to wikipedia and sort countries by GDP, any large country without a region is a target. Obviously there is some massaging happening, like AWS is considering all the nordic countries near Sweden.

Another thing would be if AWS started building smaller regions with only 1 DC. Right now a region requires at least 3 DCs with the AZ model... so that's a lot of capacity to fill.

While what you say makes perfect sense to _everyone_, sadly it is not true. London and Canada - both very new regions for AWS - each only have two availability zones (making them basically useless for a large class of infrastructure).

There are a number of cities (Cairo, Riyadh, and Tehran come to mind) that are closer to Israel than Austin is from its nearest AWS data center, so plenty of other options as well to service Israel.

Kenya... It's not the backwoods that the west thinks it is...

I find that hard to believe. Wikipedia says its HDI is 0.555, placing it at 146 of 188. Wikipedia also says that 6.3% of the adult population have HIV, while female genital mutilation has a prevalence of 27%. Also some women are seemingly attacked and sometimes killed for witchcraft.

I understand there are worse places in Afrika, but for me that makes Kenya a proper shithole.

You obviously have never been to Kenya...

But as a retort, in America, gay and trans people get denied rights and are killed everyday because they are "an abomination to god". Women are denied medican support by old white men who know what's best for them. Black people get killed by the police with no recourse. There is human trafficking that goes unaddressed because our economy is basically built on it. There is a horribly stratified economy, and a horrible opioid (and in my opinion, alchohol) epidemic...

But keep living in your shell man.

Of course I haven't. But I was quite sure that you would say something along those lines. I think that if I went to Kenya, I would have a great time, see friendly people and come to the conclusion that the country has potential and is on the right track.

That may all well be true, but it doesn't change the fact that Kenya - as it is now - is not a country I would build a datacenter in. I don't have to go to Kenya myself to know if it is a backwards country or not. The facts are the facts.

> I don't have to go to Kenya myself to know if it is a backwards country or not. The facts are the facts.

I don't have to experience something to know anything about it. I'll make my opinion from a far from statistics that have no correlation to whether a datacenter could actually thrive in Kenya.

> I don't have to experience something to know anything about it. I'll make my opinion from a far from statistics that have no correlation to whether a datacenter could actually thrive in Kenya.

First of all, I reject the notion that only first hand experiences are a valid way of forming opinions. In fact I would argue that statistics and facts are better than feelings and impressions for making business decisions in basically every single way.

Second, I never said a datacenter wouldn't thrive in Kenya. It probably would, as Afrika is in dire need of a datacenter, which is the context of this thread. That said, I wouldn't build a datacenter in Kenya, because I - in contrast to your assertion that Kenya isn't "the backwoods that the west thinks it is" - think that the facts conclusively prove that Kenya is, in fact, a shithole.

Other countries (like America) may have their problems, but not at this scale and severity.

> Other countries (like America) may have their problems, but not at this scale and severity.

You've cherry picked problems, that you have no actual knowledge of, comment on the "scale and severity", and say that those problems disqualify Kenya from having hosting an AWS data center. However, the problems of other countries (the US, China, Brazil) don't disqualify them. Not to mention that there are other data centers in Kenya, which seem to operate just fine.

I assume that you think that Amazon would be clearing parts of the African Serengeti and protecting it's racks from lions, wildebeest and tribesmen.

In reality, they would buy real estate in Nairobi like every other major company.

>>>But keep living in your shell man.

> I assume that you think that Amazon would be clearing parts of the African Serengeti and protecting it's racks from lions, wildebeest and tribesmen.

And I assume you think of me as some kind of idiot. Of course I understand that Kenya is not as you just said, but I consider Kenya an underdeveloped country that does not have its act together. I really don't see how you can argue against that based on facts.

No, LGBTI+people are not killed everyday in America for being an "abomination to God". It's a lot lower than that.

Women do get medical support, maybe not enough, it's not true that all women are denied medical support.

Yes, America is not a utopia, but it's not as bad as you paint it.

>No, LGBTI+people are not killed everyday in America for being an "abomination to God". It's a lot lower than that.

What does this even mean?

> Yes, America is not a utopia, but it's not as bad as you paint it.

And my point was that the same could be said for Kenya, if you knew anything about it.

The USA has a male genital mutilation rate of 79%, about 5% of African American males are incarcerated, and the vice president wants to defund HIV research in favour of funding "conversion therapy".

It's easy to cherry pick facts to make a country look terrible.

I agree with everything you said in principle, but I disagree with your conclusion.

I don't have to cherry pick facts to make Kenya look bad, I just picked a bunch of pretty bad ones about Kenya to illustrate my point.

I also find it telling that, instead of cherry picking positive things about Kenya to disprove my point, posters in this thread resorted Whataboutisms with respect to the US.

I really don't like being in this thread, arguing viewpoints that I myself consider borderline bigotry, but the notion that Kenya is somehow on par with the US or even any other developed nation is preposterous.

I didn't think you were cherry-picking facts deliberately; but there's an inevitable amount of accidental cherry-picking when we evaluate other countries based on the factors we consider to be important. It's like the "paradox" that 90% of drivers consider themselves to be better than average drivers; people who drive fast praise themselves for driving fast and people who drive slowly praise themselves for driving slowly, because in both cases how they drive is driven (pun not intended) by what they consider to be "good" driving.

I absolutely agree than Kenya and the USA are not "on par" with each other; but before jumping from that to describing Kenya as "a proper shithole" I'd want to talk to Kenyans and find out how Kenya measures up under their standards.

Pick a spot [1] touched by more than one thick pipe, in jurisdiction known for political and civic stability and a regime with rough compatibility to the ideology and national security apparatus of western allies -- their home base and primary source of customers; receptive and promoting of foreign investment, and having access to multiple reliable, redundant power sources from which to draw energy.

As of time of writing it's a tough proposition.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Cable_ma...

Tunisia may be an option

South Africa is the most obvious spot. There's even an AWS dev centre in Cape Town: http://www.adccpt.com/

At this point it seems that big US companies are too afraid to invest in Africa.

Which is kind of strange, since they weren't afraid to invest in China or Iraq.

On top of this, funnily enough, the Chinese aren't afraid and by the time the US companies get going...

What? Comparing the situation in Africa to China? FFS, Hacker News...

>"At this point it seems that big US companies are too afraid to invest in Africa"

That statement is just plain wrong and uninformed.

Google, FB, IBM and Microsoft are all making significant investments in Africa. See the following:

http://fortune.com/2016/05/26/u-s-tech-giants-flock-to-afric...

The world's largest young populations are all in Africa and these companies know this:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/the-world-s-10-younge...

No idea if any of this is true today, but here's what a quick google search found:

https://www.quora.com/Is-Amazon-planning-to-open-a-data-cent...

"Franco Austin, former Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services:

'Whilst South Africa only have a single energy provider, no. So the answer would be probably not soon, unless AWS plan to build their own energy provider, the requirements for a DC for AWS is that it has got 2 independent electricity providers on different grids. Thus I doubt if South Africa will see an AWS data center and I love to be proven wrong, at this stage I believe the best we can hope for in South Africa is a pop or edge location.'"

I think Eskom will remain the single energy provider in South Africa for some time, but I think this concern can be mitigated by simply generating the power yourself or via a partner company that offers local electricity directly from e.g. a solar panel farm. South Africa has sufficient solar potential.

But that would likely be expensive enough to make the risk not worth it.

A map of the new locations can be found here: https://www.thelocal.se/20170404/map-amazon-to-open-three-ne.... Seems like the one in Västerås is right next to the Westinghouse uranium fuel factory. Sadly no power plant right next to it though :)

Also an entry on Werner Vogel's blog about this.

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/04/aws-announces-eu...

Interesting that AWS didn't chose to place their DC's at the "Node Pole" (http://thenodepole.com) in the northern parts of Sweden where FB have theirs.

Slightly OT, but also interesting that the "Node Pole" host their website on AWS...

I'm actually disappointed they went with Stockholm. Though I can understand why (proximity to a large pool of talent among other things).

They aren't actually located in Stockholm, but close enough to use resources from the Stockholm Area. Supposedly the DCs will be located in Västerås, Eskilstuna and Katrineholm[0].

[0] http://digital.di.se/artikel/amazon-oppnar-tre-datacenter-i-...

I see, that makes more sense I guess. Still, I would've liked it if they put the DCs in Norr- or Västerbotten. I'm very partial though ;P

You're biased, you mean?

Same thing: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/partial

Didn't now that, thx :)

Why would they need to be close to 'a large pool of talent' in order to run a bunch of hosting? It doesn't take that many people to run a hosting facility, the ones I'm familiar with are mostly deserted. They take people to set up and a large amount of capital but once that's done it takes very few people to run.

Even the (very large) Google data centers typically do not employ more than 100 people, that's 30 people over 3 shifts and some overhead.

>Why would they need to be close to 'a large pool of talent' in order to run a bunch of hosting?

They don't. There will be a handful of English speaking data center operators, but that's it.

Most Swedes are actually English speaking, they won't have to get people from other countries for the language.

You're probably right. I'm not really familiar with what it takes to operate a data center.

Most likely to be closer to the capital Stockholm, main Internet exchange and startups in Sweden. Further more you will have better latency to the rest of Nordics closer to Stockholm.

Population density of the Nordics https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden#/media/File:Norden_pop_...

Have to wonder how much of the push for more EU AWS regions comes from dealing with a potential exodus from the London region due Brexit (e.g. because of data protection issues)

I imagine the greater concern is the deep integration between the NSA, GCHQ and ISPs in the UK and USA.

As if any first-world government weren't already monitoring everyone as best they can?

AFAIK the US and UK share the databases access(or have an easy/fast way to share info - sorry I forgot where I got this information so I don't have a link tas a proof but I think is already a known fact) so hopefully NSA has to do more paperwork before asking other EU country for data.

it's not just the US and UK - they're just 2 members of the intelligence sharing community. There's Five Eyes, bringing in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and from there the scope widens considerably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes.2C_14_E...

Err.. The Swedish FRA[1] is in cahoots with the ones you mention. I doubt that's the concern.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defence_Radio_Estab...

Sweden cooperates with the NSA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defence_Radio_Establi...

In Sweden we've got "FRA", which is one of NSA's BFFs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defence_Radio_Establi...

FRA, the Swedish national authority for signals intelligence, is well-known for collaborating with the NSA.

Dude, you'd not believe how big the demand on the UK region is.

Care to elaborate?

Data centre in Dublin is well established (UK centre is fairly new IIRC?) and there is zero chance of Ireland leaving the EU, so I doubt this is the reason.

The German one is also older than the UK one.

I think (with no basis in reputable source) it's more just that Amazon see a large potential market in Europe that current Regions can't cover. There're also possibly local data laws / policies that mean not every company could use one of the existing Regions.

Morocco, South Africa, Dubai could be new regions.

That's a slightly awkward looking reference customer list (assuming that's what it is).

May I ask why? Is it just because you don't know them?

I know them, but those startup names are hardly household names even in Sweden.

SuperCell and TrustPilot are big names....

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