AWS Plans to Launch a Local zone in Nairobi & Johannesburg: What does it mean?
Early this year, AWS announced their planned global expansion of their AWS local zones to different areas in the world. Already, AWS has in the recent past completed 16 new local zones in the US and another 32 local zones in new metropolitan areas situated in 26 countries that are currently in the pipeline.
Notable cities in Africa include Nairobi in Kenya and Johannesburg in South Africa.
Source: AWS
This is after the successful rollout of the first in sub-Saharan Africa Edge Location in Kenya in 2020 and the first AWS region in Africa located in Cape Town, South Africa.
This is really exciting and indicative of the rise of Africa as a cloud consumer and a critical player in the global scene with more technology solutions coming from within the continent.
So what does this mean for Kenya, South Africa, and Africa at large?
Before we get into it let's get back to the basics, shall we?
What is cloud computing and AWS?
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services like servers, storage, databases, networking, etc over the internet to the end-user. Fundamentally, giving you (the end-user) access to a huge amount of computing resources without you having to buy physical servers as you ‘rent’ them from the cloud provider.
Think about it like this: You have your smartphone and you like taking pictures. After a period of time, you realize your storage is full. You have two choices, to either buy a physical memory card or create an iCloud or Google photos account to get more storage without buying a memory card. That is what we mean by leveraging the cloud.
AWS is one of the world's largest cloud providers. They power Netflix, Safaricom, and Ajua. They have huge data centers and fiber optic networks that they have built over the years to provide a variety of services.
Back to local zones:
Local zones are small data centers that extend AWS cloud computing closer to a large population, industry, or other information technology centers. This supercharges customers' ability to deploy applications with very little latency (loading time) closer to you as an end-user. The end result is users of the platform get single-digit latency for video streaming, financial transactions, and real-time gaming for users in the metropolitan area. This is quite timely with the 5G networks being rolled out in the coming years.
Local zones leverage a concept called edge computing whereby the focus is shifted from a central data center (i.e. in North Virginia) to the logical edge of the infrastructure essentially taking the cloud resources closer to the client. The principle is straightforward: If you can't get the data closer to the data center, get the data center closer to the data.
Also with the new Data Protection Act, 2019 requiring local data residency of customer data, local zones enable more organizations in Kenya to use the cloud while leveraging the cloud still.
My experience working at Impact Africa Network, a startup that is centered around engineering the next great African companies has involved leveraging AWS to deploy our portfolio of projects:
JENGA School: a computer science professional skills development institution currently offering data science and software engineering programs that leverages AWS Sage Maker for students to run Machine Learning Models in their classes.
Kuzah: This aims to be the financial well-being partner for the new generation. Kuzah provides financial literacy sessions, a savings and investment platform, along with a community of like-minded individuals who are moving towards financial freedom. They are able to do this using AWS compute power to quickly deploy their first 1st minimum viable product within minutes.
Seamless HQ: This is a cloud-based HR software for the African Market. It aims to capture the fragmented HR space in Africa and make it one seamless experience. This product leverages Amazon elastic cache to ensure asynchronous tasks like processing payslips in bulk every end of the month ensuring smooth payroll processing for organizations.
We are building compelling projects with consistent user experiences that are impactful and improve the lives of Africans.
We are harnessing the cloud to create opportunities for young talented Africans to be part of the digital transformation of Kenya.
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