Amazon Web Services are now rolling out in South Africa as the company is busy implementing the cloud services so they can go live in the next few weeks. Word spread that these servers are now being implemented which of course, sparked the typical “we want Fortnite South African servers” debate and even led to the hashtag #FortniteAfricanServers trending on Twitter. We have some bad news, these servers are not your new local Fortnite South Africa servers.
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While many gamers are putting pressure on server hosting companies like the new Amazon Web Services, the chances of the new data servers being used for Fortnite are low for now. According to Twitter user Jason, he explains that the SA AWS region does not yet have Elastic Kubernetes Services support yet.
EKS is a vital part of Fortnite’s game code and is required in order for the server to be enabled for the popular battle royale. The new servers are being implemented for other services in Africa. If Amazon decides to turn some of them into Fortnite South African servers then that would be great for some but in the meantime, that is not happening. Amazon would have to build specific databases with EKS support in order for them to work for Fortnite.
Unfortunately for all the people jumping on the #FortniteAfricanServers bandwagon, I still don’t think it’s currently possible. The SA AWS region doesn’t yet have EKS and it seems they run containerised Kubernetes applications as per: https://t.co/fekEXDKudz
— Jason (@JasP_19) April 22, 2020
There’s still some debate whether or not South African Fortnite servers will be beneficial to the community. Most of the time games that launch with a local server end up being empty months after launch when the hype dies down. Sure, Fortnite is a big game but just because you play it does not mean the country has tens of thousands of players that can keep the server packed at all times. With that being said, the game’s cross-play might just be the answer to that. You will just have to go back and play with lag again, sorry about that :(. We know there is a Fortnite South Africa community, we just need to be patient.
