A View from the Stoep:Tracking the evolution of local hosting in ZA and beyond

Joe Abley, Director of Architecture

Jim Cowie, Chief Scientist

iWeek 2015

Cape Town, 7 September 2015

@DynResearch

Global Content, Local Hosting• Can we think of content hosting

choices as a kind of international trade policy – import and export?

• What are the implications when we pay to import more content than we host/create locally?

• Strong local content growth improves consumer experience ($)

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Today’s Presentation

• Using South Africa as a specific example, let’s see where content lives, and what impact that has on consumers

• We’ll try two different experiments, one starting with public Alexa data, the other with private ccTLD zone data (thanks, ZACR!)

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EXPERIMENT 1:FINDING THE ALEXA 100

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Where’s The Popular Content?• Retrieve Alexa.com’s list of the top 100

sites for various countries (public data)

• Resolve the apex domains to determine one or more A records for each domain in the zone

• Geolocate each service IP and use BGP routing data to examine the origin and transit providers for each domain

• Calculate the fraction of each country’s popular content that is locally hosted

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National Self-Hosting Percentages US

CN

VN

CZIR

HU

CA

MX

SA

AE

TR

KRJP

BR RU

PL

DE

Correlates with ASN count, ρ = +0.69ZA

(Importers) (Exporters)

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Self-Hosting % of Alexa Top 100

USA (90%) suppresses local hosting for the Western Hemisphere:• Canada (16%)

Mexico (17%)• Panama (15%)• Costa Rica

(15%)• Colombia

(8%)

China: 85%

Russia: 55%

Iran: 65%

Vietnam: 71%

Median: 33%52%

30%

11%

Africa

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Self-Hosting % of Alexa Top 100

USA (90%) suppresses local hosting for the Western Hemisphere:• Canada (16%)

Mexico (17%)• Panama (15%)• Costa Rica

(15%)• Colombia

(8%)

China: 85%

Russia: 55%

Iran: 65%

Vietnam: 71%

Median: 33%

47%

17%

27%

The Middle East

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Self-Hosting % of Alexa Top 100

USA (90%) suppresses local hosting for the Western Hemisphere:• Canada (16%)

Mexico (17%)• Panama (15%)• Costa Rica

(15%)• Colombia

(8%)

China: 85%

Russia: 55%

Iran: 65%

Vietnam: 71%

Median: 33%60%

15%

15%

South Asia

5%

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SOUTH AFRICA’S POPULAR CONTENT

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South Africa’s Alexa Hosting (1/2)

Has IPv6 Address?Hosted in S Africa?

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South Africa’s Alexa Hosting (2/2)

Has IPv6 Address?Hosted in S Africa?

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South Africa’s Alexa 100 Hosting

31% of South Africa’s most popular content is hosted (at least partially) within South Africa

Roughly:

• About one third domestic • More than one third US • Less than one third EU

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Compare to Kenya’s Alexa Hosting

• Only 10.9% of Kenya’s most popular content is hosted within Africa

• Nearly all of that is within Kenya itself – reasonable given latencies within Africa

• Some large content still occasionally maps KE users to ZA caches

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EXPERIMENT 2:

*.CO.ZA

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Now let’s look at the ccTLD

• Retrieved zone data for .CO.ZA

(Thank You, .ZACR!)

• Resolved the apex domains against the designated authoritative servers to determine one or more A records for each domain in the zone

• Geolocated each service IP and used BGP routing data to examine the origin and transit providers for each domain

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Local hosting is much stronger within .CO.ZA

• More than 2x the local hosting rate, compared to the Alexa 100

• An IP address for .CO.ZA content is more than twice as likely to be domestic than overseas.

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Top Hosting Providers: South African .CO.ZAProvider World % Local % Count Organization

…and a very long tail of smaller hosting providers

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Top Transit Providers: South African .CO.ZAProvider World % Local % Count Organization

Numbers sum to >100% because of multihoming!

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Top Hosting Providers: North American .CO.ZAProvider World % Local % Count Organization

…and a very long tail of smaller hosting providers

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Top Transit Providers: North American .CO.ZAProvider World % Local % Count Organization

Numbers sum to >100% because of multihoming!

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Local Content, Local Exchange, Diverse International Transit

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WHY LOCAL CONTENT MATTERS:IMPACTS ON ENDUSER EXPERIENCE

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NOTE: Some cities host multiple collectors. Cable Map credit: Telegeography

Active Measurement Infrastructure

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Latencies from Cape Town

250-300ms West Africa

150+ms Western Europe

200-250ms Eastern Europe, North Africa

<50ms to Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe

250-300ms Middle East

100-200ms East Africa

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Latencies from Cape Town

300+msCentral,West US

200-250ms Eastern US

350+msSouth

America

300ms+ to South Asia,400+ms to East Asia

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Top Hosting Cities: American .ZA

Houston: 2.9%

Dallas: 1.4%

Chicago: 1.7%

Phoenix: 1.6%

281ms

256ms

310ms

279ms

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NEXT STEPS:

HOW YOU CAN HELP

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Two Kinds of Questions We’d Like To Answer in Africa

Trending Questions

• Is local hosting increasing/decreasing? DNSSEC adoption? IPv6?

• Are consumers experiencing more or less latency/congestion as they try to access important content?

Correlation Questions

• As IXPs open, cables land, providers enter and exit markets, what changes in these metrics do we observe in each country?

• What are the regional effects, and how can hosting and transit trends in one country affect its neighbors?

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Three Things That Would Really Help!

1. Access to Zone data from every African ccTLD, refreshed regularly

2. Installation of Measurement points within every major African city, either as Virtual Servers or Dyn Edge Servers

3. Independent sources of query rate data to help objectively track what content is locally and regionally popular

A View from the Stoep:Tracking the evolution of local hosting in ZA and beyond

Joe Abley, Director of Architecture

Jim Cowie, Chief Scientist

iWeek 2015

Cape Town, 7 September 2015