Microsoft to Deliver Microsoft Cloud from Datacenters in Africa

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2017/05/18/microsoft-deliver-microsoft-cloud-datacenters-africa/

by el_duderino • 9 years ago

208 110 9 years ago

blogs.microsoft.com

staticelf• 9 years ago

Cool. From what I know Africa is like the only continent so far without any datacenters from the major players. Correct me if I am wrong.

Glad to see things change and a small step into a more connected and peaceful world.

finid3• 9 years ago

A few years ago I recall that IBM announced a plan to set up something in Kenya.

But don't blame the industry for not having a major datacenter anywhere on that continent. You need a stable power supply for that to make sense, which very few countries there have. Even Ghana that used to brag about that is now a basket case, last I checked.

mirajshah• 9 years ago

IBM launched their datacenter last year

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49305.wss

ams6110• 9 years ago

You need a stable power supply for that to make sense

You also need a stable and at least substantially non-corrupt political situation, I would think? That rules out a lot of countries in Africa.

oblio3• 9 years ago

Africa's a big place, but I think you're right. If you take out South Africa the rest of the continent is completely "out of the loop" concerning cloud services from the major players, it seems.

chirau2• 9 years ago

That's a lie. Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt are just as adept to cloud as South Africa is.

EDIT:Screw the 'groupthink' on HN. Why would you downvote a simple non-offensive comment like this? Africa and its technology are my specific area for research. I know what I am talking about.

pjmlp• 9 years ago

Fully agree.

It is great that those countries get the infrastructure to enjoy what is already possible in the majority of the world.

Sure there are many roadblocks for that to be an easy goal, but not doing anything is worse I think.

johan_larson2• 9 years ago

Not a lot of datacenters in Antarctica. :(

JorgeGT• 9 years ago

Think about how much you would save in cooling...

matharmin2• 9 years ago

One issue is that neighbouring African countries don't have good connectivity - the connection to the EU is typically better than to their neighbours. So if you want to serve e.g. users in Kenya, it would typically be better to use a datacenter in the EU than one in South Africa.

phr4ts• 9 years ago

Based on my own experience:

...because they don't know that the internet is a network of networks. I.e. They should build their own strong internal network.

Instead, their networks are designed only as dumb pipes to deliver the internet.

wjoe2• 9 years ago

Yep. We've had to do some work for clients in Africa in my job. One we did in Morocco was fine from EU data centers on AWS, but South Africa has been very difficult to serve with acceptable latency from any data centre we've tried.

We're 90% AWS here, but would probably use Azure for those clients if they had a data centre in that region.

nevi-me2• 9 years ago

Some industries flat-out give you issues with moving SA data out, and others have players that are very risk-averse and aren't moving to the cloud.

My day-job is as a consultant in the financial sector. It's been always burdensome getting a project approved where the data will reside outside of the country. We have smaller players , but their rates are exorbitant in comparison to MS, GOOG and Amazon.

I'm glad and optimistic about this move from MS, because now we can get more work done with less red-tape.

cyxxon2• 9 years ago

UIh, any specific issues? My company will be rolling out SAP from Germany to ZA soonish, and so far we have not yet had a chance to actually really test the connection. Self-hosted data center here, so probably not that comparable. Just overall crappy connection?

_urga2• 9 years ago

Hetzner South Africa have datacenters in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Their reliability and support is excellent. I am assuming that your services are not limited to cloud VMs and can run on bare metal machines.

skc2• 9 years ago

South Africa is pretty much the only country where this was ever going to be possible.

Perhaps Rwanda as well.

Uninterrupted power is a major challenge here on the continent.

pizzetta• 9 years ago

Maybe Ghana as well or even Egypt.

Analemma_• 9 years ago

I think the parent is too pessimistic. You are right, and Nigeria and Kenya would be acceptable choices too.

yread• 9 years ago

Namibia is supposedly good as well

https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/IC.ELC.OUTG/rank...

vezycash3• 9 years ago

Uninterrupted power is a major challenge here on the continent.

Power is no biggie - network providers have learned to live on power generators.

The main issue is that Cable, Fiber penetration is very low.

phamilton• 9 years ago

Power is no biggie - network providers have learned to live on power generators.

Equinix datacenters in SV are actually cheaper to run on a generator, but it's not sustainable and against regulations (except obviously in a power outage).

John238322• 9 years ago

Kenya

alnitak• 9 years ago

Out of all the African countries, why Rwanda?

camperman• 9 years ago

It's criss-crossed with fiber, the ICT policy is very open and the leadership friendly. Also it's a small country.

mrweasel• 9 years ago

I think you could do Morocco as well, but isn't uninterrupted power also a major issue in South Africa. You only have Eskom and they don't seem to be that well run or have enough well maintained power plants.

greenhatman• 9 years ago

Having data centers in Morocco probably doesn't give that much of an advantage, seeing as it's so close to Europe.

douche• 9 years ago

If you're going to build a huge data center, how much harder is it to throw in a little natural gas or oil power plant on the edge of the campus?

Lordarminius3• 9 years ago

That may be the solution they end up implementing.

ramshanker• 9 years ago

No developer goes back to higher latency once you have tasted the smaller one !

germtone• 9 years ago

Africa eh? i feel so safe now.

(1) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Worldwid...

(2) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Xkeyscor...

John238322• 9 years ago

I was just in a comment thread here where someone describe Africa as "a shithole" (their exact words ) when it came to hosting data centers. Glad to see that the people actual making decisions in tech have some rational ability.

mozey• 9 years ago

I've never seriously considered using Azure, I'm quite happy with AWS. Problem is the closest zone to South Africa is EU. This might make me consider using Azure. I hope Amazon has similar plans in the works.

aswanson• 9 years ago

The thing that Azure has over AWS, imo, is the integration it has with Visual Studio.

outside1234• 9 years ago

What's hilarious is that Amazon's S3 service is literally developed in Cape Town. Amazing that they weren't first with this.

matharmin2• 9 years ago

As far as I know it's EC2 that's developed in Cape Town, not S3. Your point is still valid though.

madiathomas10• 9 years ago

I am hosting my SaaS site using Google Cloud. All my clients are based in SA. I chose Google Cloud after experiencing very bad service from Azure. I won't go back to Azure, even if they build the datacenter behind my yard. I love the pricing and simplicity of Google Cloud. Ironically, my site is on Microsoft .NET stack, but I still don't trust Microsoft with hosting my site.

I hope Google and AWS will follow suite and build datacenter in SA.

simooooo• 9 years ago

Care to give some specifics?

madiathomas10• 9 years ago

First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. Google offered me $300 credit which lasted for 5 months because the total monthly cost is $59.00. Azure was expensive compared to Google Cloud. Their pricing was also complicated and full of jargons. Microsoft offering was also not appealing. They were offering less memory and less storage space.

Up to this day, I still don't understand why Google can offer services using Microsoft software cheaper than Microsoft itself. Maybe I am just not their target market.

christogreeff• 9 years ago

Service from Azure support has always been superb for me. What type of trial were you looking at?

madiathomas10• 9 years ago

I only needed a month trial.

boulos• 9 years ago

Cool! Luckily, we have a POP in Johannesburg and it's "only" 160ms from there to London/Paris along our backbone (then another handful to europe-west1 in Belgium). Do you have good telemetry on the kind of latency your customers on seeing?

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

madiathomas10• 9 years ago

I haven't checked. All I know is that they are happy. I will check and report back.

Vinnl• 9 years ago

Funny, I don't have personal experience with either, but I'm always reading that Google's customer service is abysmal (i.e. non-existent). But then, maybe you just haven't needed them yet.

NicoJuicy• 9 years ago

Just mentioning, i didn't knew Google Cloud does the .Net stack also. But i haven't had any bad experience with Azure ( small webapps, not huge ones). ( i chose Azure over Amazon)

I just publish and run. Some web apps have been running for over 4 years, without me touching it and paying customers ( 1-10). I only had one small "downtime" moment, but it was over after 15 minutes.

I wouldn't expect anything more from where i host it. The biggest annoyance i had was the redesign of the dashboard, which had me confused for a while ( it changed a lot, so that's normal), then again, i don't hate change. I switched to the new interface asap.

madiathomas10• 9 years ago

It was also a surprise for me when I found out that Google Cloud does Microsoft .NET. Within minutes of setup, I was already connecting to my newly created server via remote desktop. The rest I do manually.

My first choice was AWS. Their telephonic verification system failed when I was trying to signup and I wasn't allowed to finalise signup. Tried 3-5 times more and gave up. Just when I was about to rewrite my system using open source technologies, I discovered that Google Cloud does have .NET support. It was a big relief.

niftich• 9 years ago

A month ago on the thread about AWS opening up a region in Sweden, a discussion ensued [1] about the lack of major cloud provider datacenters in Africa.

I wrote [2] that a good site in Africa would be challenging, because one would have to "pick a spot 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."

While South Africa ranks high on stability and ideological compatibility, and reasonably on fiber [3], my understanding was that reliable and redundant utility power supply is a significant issue [4][5]. I'd be curious to see whether co-generation will be used to overcome these limitations.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031565 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14035251 [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Cable_ma... [4] http://www.fin24.com/Economy/SA-fears-dark-days-ahead-as-pow... [4] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/03/crippling-... [5] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/03/crippling-...

tertius• 9 years ago

Google has already started working on this to a degree.

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

madiathomas10• 9 years ago

SA experienced power challenges few years back, but those issues are long gone. I haven't experienced any power cuts in over a year now.

danw3• 9 years ago

Is it just me or is one year a pretty low bar to set for granting a problem the title of "long gone"?

mikiem• 9 years ago

I am seeing a lot of comments about the need for stable power. It seems logical, but it’s not an absolute need. I managed a data center win San Diego at the time of the California electrical power crisis [1] near the end of the Dot Com days. I have operated more than one at a time since. During those times, which produced rolling blackouts, we just ended up running our generators more often. Power outages in Data Center happen during maintenance and upgrades, not so much during power grid outages. I have still never never had a data center go down during a power grid outage… but have seen many during upgrades, and maintenance.

In the years since the rolling blackouts, I have been colocated in data centers that have made the decision to use special pricing available from the power utility, available when you can have a preemptable load… during peak hours of peak season the power company can tell you to get off the grid with short notice. The data center operators did OK when they did this for most years. They got a lower price on power all year, in exchange for running their generators more. I’d say that the typical year, they ran the generators for several hours per day for 7 to 10 days in the Summer months. The last year they dd this, they ran a much higher number of days than expected… maybe 15 - 18 days from noon to 7pm. I understand they had to stop doing this because of the pollution of the generators or the permits required for such heavy usage... but that info is not first hand. It could have been many other reasons such as neighbors complaining about the noise in the business parks (2MW diesel generators are deafeningly loud), costs related to running the generators for so many hours, etc.

To operate like this, you have to be on your game for maintenance of the generators and checklists and training. You also have to have multiple contracts with fuel delivery trucks, just incase your outage lasts for a while. These data centers were all under 5MW in size each. We never lost critical load during a power supplier outage. I hope I have illustrated that a reliable power supply is not strictly required to run a reliable data center or service that is dependent upon a reliable data center.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

jksmith• 9 years ago

MSFT is starting to get it. Many startups are being funded for stupid projects that target the US and are based in SF. The future belongs to markets like Africa and S. America. They currently take about 6% each of world's total software market.

throwme_1980• 9 years ago

bad idea ....

cmurf• 9 years ago

I'm curious what the median salary is in these data centers.

rcgorton• 9 years ago

From the press release: - It happens in 2018 - They brag about "40 cloud regions" across the world. But do not say anything about their current capabilities in Africa. - 40 "Regions"? where are these 'regions' located? And why so many? Are they incapable of handling large geographical areas?

Makes me skeptical about Micro$lop

_zl9i• 9 years ago

This must increase the cooling demands a lot.

_urga2• 9 years ago

Are these cloud services going to be served from newly built 100% Microsoft datacenters or servers colocated with Hetzner South Africa (Cape Town and Joburg)?

rainbowmverse• 9 years ago

I don't know anything about the technicals, politics, and economics of this kind of thing. What's the difference between the two setups?

Microsoft to Deliver Microsoft Cloud from Datacenters in Africa

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