Measuring Cloud Latency in Africa

Internet and Public Cloud adoption has been growing all over the world, and major Cloud Providers have a growing presence in Africa. However, little research has been conducted on performance of the Cloud in Africa, particularly from end users' point of view. This study measures network latencies experienced in Africa when accessing public Cloud infrastructure, and compares this with what is achievable in Europe. We use the RIPE Atlas platform to run latency and traceroute measurements to CDN endpoints and servers in datacenters in Africa and Europe. Reverse measurements are also conducted from the Virtual servers to non-RIPE endpoints in both Africa and Europe. Our results show that clients in Africa mostly use CDN nodes located outside the continent, resulting in higher latencies. We also observed some clients making use of circuitous routes to cloud destinations within Africa. In Europe, we found that a majority of CDN endpoints used were local, which resulted in lower latencies. We also find that using CDN nodes in Africa provides up to 87% lower latencies than accessing the Data Centres directly. In Europe, CDN access provided up to 142% lower latencies than accessing Data Centers. Results of this study should motivate cloud providers to continue increasing their CDN presence in Africa and to work with local ISPs to optimise routing and content delivery from their cloud infrastructure.