I first read about AWS launching a region in Africa in 2019. It was going to be launched in Cape Town, South Africa, making it the 23rd AWS Region and the first in Africa. At that time, I read that it was expected to be launched in February 2020, but it finally launched in April 2020.
AWS had a development center in 2004, where they pioneered the technologies that eventually led to the Amazon Elastic Compute EC2 service. They, later on, launched PoPs in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Nairobi for their edge services, such as CloudFront (their content delivery network service). A region in Africa is a big deal because it brings AWS core services closer to users on the continent. Before the Cape Town region, some businesses that relied on AWS Cloud in Africa mostly used the region in Ireland due to lower latencies. A user in Pretoria mentioned in a post that moving some APIs and infrastructure from eu-west-1 (Ireland) to af-south-1 (Cape Town) resulted in about a 10x decrease in latency from ~700ms to ~70ms per API Gateway.
Another positive thing about the new region is that companies can choose to have their data stored locally in South Africa, which complies with South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
It wasn't until I followed Veliswa Boya on Corey Quinn's Screaming In The Cloud podcast that I was really pushed into looking at the services in the Cape Town Region. Not all AWS services were launched with the new region. For example, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) was launched a few months later, on the 6th of August 2020. So I decided to look into what the region had to offer, and it was then that I discovered something a bit unusual which I didn't experience with other regions.
How it went down
I signed into the AWS Management Console, which took me to the North California region. Then I selected the Africa(Cape Town) af-south-1 region from the Region drop-down menu and continued.
I expected to be overwhelmed by all the services in the AWS console, but I was greeted with the following page;
I had deployed and worked in several regions before, but I had never seen this page. Anyway, I continued, but it took more steps than expected to get the region ready for exploitation.
I clicked on continue, and the next page showed me a list of all the AWS regions in the world. Most of the regions had their status as "Enabled by default" except for four regions in a "Disabled" state. The Cape Town region status was "Disabled", so I clicked on "Enable".
I quickly read through the next page and clicked on Enable region.
I was returned to the page with the list of all the regions, and the status was now "Enabled".
I was expecting to see the full console dashboard with 175 or more services. But when I tried to access the AWS console in the Cape Town region again, I received the following message.
I kept on refreshing the page for about 3 minutes until I was able to see the VPC Console, as you can see below.
Wrap Up
Cloud computing workloads that cater to users in Africa can now run on the continent and benefit from lower latencies (though this favours mostly the countries closer to South Africa) and compliance with data sovereignty regulations. But developers must first enable the region before exploitation. Below is a list of the regions whose status is disabled by default. Africa (Cape Town) Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Europe (Milan) Middle East (Bahrain)
I hope this has been informative to you. I will be writing about my experience with the Cape Town region and AWS in general in future blog posts. You can read more about my experiences on fonnkwenti.hashnode.dev, or if you are in a hurry, you can enjoy little snippets of information on my AWS For People In A Hurry series, which is coming soon.
Thanks for reading 👊🏽
References
docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.. aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-afric.. docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/lates..