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 ($)

@DynResearch 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!)

@DynResearch EXPERIMENT 1: FINDING THE ALEXA 100

@DynResearch 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

@DynResearch National Self-Hosting Percentages US CN VN CZ IR HU CA MX SA AE TR KR JP BR RU PL DE Correlates with ASN count, ρ = ZA (Importers) (Exporters)

@DynResearch 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

@DynResearch 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

@DynResearch 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% South Asia 5%

@DynResearch SOUTH AFRICA’S POPULAR CONTENT

@DynResearch South Africa’s Alexa Hosting (1/2) Has IPv6 Address? Hosted in S Africa?

@DynResearch South Africa’s Alexa Hosting (2/2) Has IPv6 Address? Hosted in S Africa?

@DynResearch 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

@DynResearch 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

@DynResearch EXPERIMENT 2: *.CO.ZA

@DynResearch 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

@DynResearch 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.

@DynResearch Top Hosting Providers: South African.CO.ZA Provider World % Local %Count Organization …and a very long tail of smaller hosting providers

@DynResearch Top Transit Providers: South African.CO.ZA Provider World % Local %Count Organization Numbers sum to >100% because of multihoming!

@DynResearch Top Hosting Providers: North American.CO.ZA Provider World % Local %Count Organization …and a very long tail of smaller hosting providers

@DynResearch Top Transit Providers: North American.CO.ZA Provider World % Local %Count Organization Numbers sum to >100% because of multihoming!

@DynResearch Local Content, Local Exchange, Diverse International Transit

@DynResearch WHY LOCAL CONTENT MATTERS: IMPACTS ON ENDUSER EXPERIENCE

@DynResearch NOTE: Some cities host multiple collectors. Cable Map credit: Telegeography Active Measurement Infrastructure

@DynResearch Latencies from Cape Town ms West Africa 150+ms Western Europe ms Eastern Europe, North Africa <50ms to Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe ms Middle East ms East Africa

@DynResearch Latencies from Cape Town 300+ms Central, West US ms Eastern US 350+ms South America 300ms+ to South Asia, 400+ms to East Asia

@DynResearch Top Hosting Cities: American.ZA Houston: 2.9% Dallas: 1.4% Chicago: 1.7% Phoenix: 1.6% 281ms 256ms 310ms 279ms

@DynResearch NEXT STEPS: HOW YOU CAN HELP

@DynResearch 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?

@DynResearch 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