Hi Folks,
I work for a Security Analytics org and we’re looking to build a small POP in Africa. I am pretty clueless about the region so I was wondering if you could help guide me in the right direction for research?
The challenges:
- Network needs to be able to receive millions of small PPS (as opposed to serving smaller numbers of larger files).
- Can’t be cloud (need bare metal servers / colo). We use the full capacity of each server, all the time.
- Must have good connectivity to most of the rest of Africa
- We can initially only have one POP
This is not like a normal website that we can just host on “any old provider”, the requirements are very different.
Is there a good location where we could either rent bare metal servers (something like Internap - preferred) or colocate servers within Africa that can serve most of the region?
“Good” is defined as an area with stable connectivity and power, no legal restrictions on things like encryption, and good latency (sub 100ms) to the rest of Africa.
Our two closest POPs are in Singapore and The Netherlands, so I’d like something closer to the middle that can serve the rest of Africa. Middle East will be deployed after Africa.
I hope this is the right place to ask.
Thanks!
Ken
The 2nd requirement seems artificial. The new hypervisors have come a long way and the overhead is minimal. Also you can run bare metal instances in AWS if you really need them with 100Gbps.
Just just use the South Africa AWS region.
^^ You had me for a second there. AWS ain't operational yet in South
Africa. Sometime 2020/2021 only.
just use the South Africa AWS region
They don't have a Region there at present - only an Edge location. I believe one is in the works for launch next year.
Well the man wants bare metal, and while there's arguments for and against it,
it's what he wants to buy 
That said, I'm one of those guys that likes owing my own hypervisor, don't
need to worry about the side channel/memory/OOO execution attacks from rogue
VM's if it's only my VM's on it. Plus AWS ain't cheap either.
My bad. They announced that Oct 2018 so I figured they’d be close to it now. Yeah turns out it’s mid 2020 
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-south-africa/
My bad. They announced that Oct 2018 so I figured they'd be close to it
now. Yeah turns out it's mid 2020 
In the Works – AWS Region in South Africa | AWS News Blog
Azure does have regions in operation in South Africa [1]
1 -
Thanks for chiming in but his reason for can’t be cloud was, “We use the full capacity of each server, all the time.” That ain’t good reason.
They do have baremetal servers like I pointed out. We use them when for cases where we need access to perf counters.
Isn't the OP really asking here (not to have their selection of
platform wrangled..):
"Where should I target my search: ZA only? is there anywhere else
worth dropping my request?"
and:
"Are there likely providers of solid colo aside from
seacom/tinka-net or workonline/ben-net ?"
The cloud isn’t always the right decision for the end customer. In many cases, it’s the worst decision.
Thanks for all the replies! (really fast!)
The requirement for Bare Metal is very specific. Dealing with high speed large files is very different to dealing with high volume small files. We regularly encounter bottlenecks at the FSB and at the IO level. Even things like RAID slows us down, so we have to squeeze every iota of power out of the servers that we can. Plus, most of our customers in Africa use our free version so cost savings are also important, and so is accessibility.
Speed is not the issue, it’s IO. Also streaming 100Gbps of video is very different to streaming 100Gbps of files smaller than 100kb (average of about 30kb) the issue on the network level is the number of connections and CPU, on the server side it’s IO and FSB
Hi Folks,
I work for a Security Analytics org and we’re looking to build a small POP in Africa. I am pretty clueless about the region so I was wondering if you could help guide me in the right direction for research?
The challenges:
- Network needs to be able to receive millions of small PPS (as opposed to serving smaller numbers of larger files).
- Can’t be cloud (need bare metal servers / colo). We use the full capacity of each server, all the time.
- Must have good connectivity to most of the rest of Africa
- We can initially only have one POP
This is not like a normal website that we can just host on “any old provider”, the requirements are very different.
Is there a good location where we could either rent bare metal servers (something like Internap - preferred) or colocate servers within Africa that can serve most of the region?
“Good” is defined as an area with stable connectivity and power, no legal restrictions on things like encryption, and good latency (sub 100ms) to the rest of Africa.
100ms from most of the rest of Africa is going to be a bit dubious. If you draw a line horizontally through Senegal the costal stuff north of it can mostly be served in under 100ms from Europe.
While cross border terrestrial fiber exists most networks I’ve been exposed to have east west and north south connectivity Via submarine connected networks. This make it hard to locate one low latency spot in the middle.
NSRC has a project that can provide some background on terrestrial fiber.
https://afterfibre.nsrc.org/
The next best place to my mind for reach east and west is South Africa where you can pick up something of a diversity of transit find decent colo and pick up a few out of region peers if you locate near jinx or cinx which are both multi building connected exchanges.
Go look at the actual specifications for one of the metal boxes - you are not going to come close to maxing anything out with the workload you describe. FSB hasn’t been a thing in over a decade. If you really wanted to go crazy you could do some build a custom solution in FPGA on the F1s.
It’s a moot point since none of this is going to be available in time but perf is a bogus reason and a lot of the times price is too.
Have you priced F1 solutions?
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These are actual real problems we face. thousands of customers load and reload TBs of data every few seconds on their dashboards. We have busy servers. We tried cloud. I passionately hate it. We choose to use Bare Metal.
Where, in Africa? It’s not a small place… Depending on where in Africa you want to deploy, there will be a choice of service providers. This is possible, but will depend on where, in Africa, you want to deploy. This is a tricky one, but if you know where you want to be, it will help to give you options. Not a problem, but where? Africa is huge, with varying levels of quality of connectivity. The 3 main regions are East Africa (Kenya leading), Southern Africa (South Africa leading) and West Africa (Nigeria and Ghana leading). For North Africa, your options can swing between Egypt and Morocco. But stringing all of these locations together, particularly West and North to East and South, will not be straight forward. Yes, all 5 will be difficult at this point in time. For most of that, hosting within Eastern and Southern Africa will be your best bets. West Africa ticks a lot of the boxes, but it’s not very straight forward when it comes to co-lo. Singapore is closer to Eastern & Southern Africa. Will be too far to West Africa unless you want to switch in Europe. The Netherlands is okay for all of Africa. The Middle East is closer to Eastern Africa. Too far for West Africa unless you want to switch in Europe. Mark.
You're right (as of my updates from last November).
Mark.
The 2nd requirement seems artificial. The new hypervisors have come a
long way and the overhead is minimal. Also you can run bare metal
instances in AWS if you really need them with 100Gbps.
That said, there are various providers who can give you bare metal.
Just just use the South Africa AWS region.
There are other local providers that can offer this. They just don't
carry the badge.
Mark.