AWS Cape Town pricing has one shape. All 438 Linux instance types AWS sells on demand in Cape Town (af-south-1) cost more than the same type in Ireland (eu-west-1), by at least 17.4% and at most 25%, and the median is 19%.
We counted it from the price files AWS publishes for each region and set Cape Town against Ireland, Frankfurt and the UAE. For a business in Kenya the 19% buys a round trip from Nairobi that is about 115 milliseconds shorter, and it is only the start of the bill, because data leaving Cape Town is priced on a different scale from data leaving Europe. CloudSpinx designs AWS estates for businesses in Kenya, and this is the arithmetic we run on the region line before anything gets sized.
AWS Cape Town pricing against Frankfurt and Ireland
On-demand Linux at shared tenancy, the same type priced in both regions, from AWS's EC2 price file:
Cape Town ÷ other region types dearer min median max
Ireland, on demand 438 438 1.174 1.190 1.250
Frankfurt, on demand 438 438 1.020 1.105 1.184
UAE, on demand 252 252 1.059 1.083 1.161
Ireland, 1-year reserved 334 334 1.069 1.190 1.204Committing for a year does not close the gap, and Frankfurt sits between Cape Town and Ireland on every one of the 438. Ireland undercuts Frankfurt on 983 of the 985 types both sell, so it is the comparison from here on.
Disk and gateways follow compute almost to the decimal. General purpose gp3 storage is USD 0.1047 per GB-month in Cape Town against 0.088 in Ireland, snapshots are 0.0595 against 0.05, and a NAT gateway is 0.057 an hour and per GB processed against 0.048. Each of those is 19% dearer.
The catalog is what a like-for-like count hides. Cape Town sells 438 types in 58 families, Ireland 1,111 in 158, and none of the AMD general-purpose, memory or burstable lines (no t3a, m6a, m7a or r6a). Only 16 Cape Town types run on an AMD processor against 182 in Ireland, and the only GPU family is g4dn. An Ireland estimate built on AMD types lands on the Intel equivalent if it has to stay on x86: a t3a.medium is USD 0.0408 an hour in Ireland, and the t3.medium Cape Town sells instead is 0.0542, 33% more. Software that runs on Arm can take the Graviton t4g.medium at 0.0434, 6% above the Ireland AMD price.
Cape Town is also disabled by default: an administrator has to enable it in each account before anything can be created there.
AWS data transfer out of Cape Town
Data leaving the region costs USD 0.154 per GB to the internet for the first 10 TB a month in Cape Town and 0.09 in Ireland or Frankfurt, 71% more. Volume does not rescue it: above 150 TB a month Cape Town charges 0.112 and Ireland 0.05.
Copying to another AWS region is the outlier. Cape Town charges USD 0.147 per GB to send data to Ireland or Frankfurt. Ireland charges 0.02 per GB to send it the other way, and arriving is free in both, so the same backup costs 7.35 times as much going from Cape Town to Ireland as from Ireland to Cape Town. A recovery design that keeps its copy in a second region pays that rate on every gigabyte it ships.
Traffic to your own building over a private link from a Kenyan data center is billed at Direct Connect's own rates, which is a separate calculation. These two lines are what serving users over the internet and keeping a copy somewhere else cost.
What 115 milliseconds buys from Nairobi
We measured TCP connect time, roughly one round trip, from a consumer line in Nairobi: Cape Town answered in a median 85 ms, Frankfurt in 191 and Ireland in 200. One ISP and one moment, so treat it as a shape, not a promise for your office.
It matters where a person waits. A new HTTPS connection takes three round trips before the first byte of a response comes back (the TCP handshake, a TLS 1.3 handshake, the request itself), so the first byte from Ireland lands about a third of a second after the first byte from Cape Town would. A phone app or a till calling an API all day feels that. CloudFront has a point of presence in Nairobi, which moves the handshakes for a front end served through it to Nairobi whichever region the origin sits in, and only the uncached requests pay the trip.
It does not matter for backups, reporting, batch jobs, a build pipeline or a standby nobody reads until a bad night. Those pay 19% for latency nobody notices.
The UAE was nearer and cheaper, and AWS has told customers to leave
On our measurement the UAE region (me-central-1) answered from Nairobi in 75 ms, ahead of Cape Town, and Cape Town cost more on every one of the 252 types both regions sell, a median 8.3% more. On paper it beat Cape Town on both counts.
Its entry on the AWS Health Dashboard has been open since 1 March. In April AWS wrote that the region "has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and is currently unable to reliably support customer applications", and asked customers to migrate everything they could reach. In September it said it is "unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 Availability Zone". Bahrain (me-south-1) got the harder sentence: AWS cannot restore data hosted exclusively in that region at all. The UAE price file still lists 290 instance types. A price list is not a status page.
Local Zones do not change the picture either. The only AWS Local Zone in Africa that is live is Lagos, with 12 instance types in its price file and an m5.xlarge at 0.292 an hour, 15% above Cape Town's 0.254. Nairobi's is still listed as announced. Of the AWS regions we measured from Nairobi, that leaves Cape Town or Europe.
One bill, priced in three regions
Here is a small production estate, chosen for the arithmetic rather than taken from a client: two m7i.xlarge application servers and one r6i.xlarge database running all month, 1,000 GB of gp3 disk, a NAT gateway with 200 GB through it, 1,000 GB billed out to the internet and 300 GB of backups copied to a second region. Every type is sold in all three regions. On-demand list prices, 730 hours, USD a month:
| Line | Cape Town | Frankfurt | Ireland |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two m7i.xlarge app servers | 389.38 | 352.59 | 328.06 |
| One r6i.xlarge database | 245.28 | 221.92 | 205.86 |
| 1,000 GB of gp3 disk | 104.70 | 95.20 | 88.00 |
| NAT gateway, 200 GB through it | 53.01 | 48.36 | 44.64 |
| 1,000 GB out to the internet | 154.00 | 90.00 | 90.00 |
| 300 GB of backups to a second region | 44.10 | 6.00 | 6.00 |
| Month | 990.47 | 814.07 | 762.56 |
Compute alone is 19% dearer in Cape Town. The whole bill is 30% dearer than Ireland and 22% dearer than Frankfurt, USD 227.91 a month or 2,734.92 a year more than Ireland, and 45% of that premium is the two data lines that are a fifth of the bill. If your estate looks nothing like this one, send it and we will price it the same way.
Where we would put it: anything a customer in Kenya taps on a phone or a till goes in Cape Town, and the premium is the price of a third of a second. An internal system used from a few offices, the reporting, the backups and the batch work go to Europe, and with the primary in Ireland the second-region copy costs 0.02 a GB instead of 0.147. If the whole AWS bill is a few hundred dollars a month, the gap is a few dozen dollars: pick on latency and do not pay anyone, us included, to work it out. And neither region is in Kenya, so if a regulator or the Data Protection Act wants the data here, a region is not the answer, and where servers can legally live in East Africa is the better place to start. A SQL Server standby is its own calculation: on an r6i.xlarge in Cape Town the license line is USD 350.40 a month, nearly nine times the 39.42 the region adds to the same server.
Converting an Ireland bill to Cape Town
Open Cost Explorer for a European estate, group it by usage type, and multiply. Instance hours, EBS volumes, snapshots and NAT gateway charges go up by about 1.19. Data transfer out to the internet goes up by 1.71 in the first 10 TB. Data transfer out to another region goes up by 7.35. Hours on t3a, m6a and r6a types go up by about 1.32 if they stay on x86, because Cape Town sells no AMD version and the drop-in is Intel (m7a is the exception, at 1.03), or by about 1.06 on the Graviton t4g, m6g or r6g if your software runs on Arm. Run it the other way, divide, and you have what leaving Cape Town would save.
Or send us the last three months of Cost Explorer by service and region (the CSV export is fine), or the instance list with disk sizes and monthly data out, through the cloud scoping form with "Cost review of what we have" selected, or on WhatsApp at +254 713 403 044. You get the estate priced in Cape Town, Frankfurt and Ireland, which parts we would place where and why, and if we run it afterwards, one monthly figure for all of it. The review is free and commits you to nothing.