Amazon cloud opens new network era in SA
Tuesday switch-on follows pioneering work in Cape Town
Amazon Web Services, the high-flying cloud division of the online retail giant Amazon, will launch its first direct, physical presence for customers in South Africa this week.
The company will switch on AWS Direct Connect in Johannesburg and Cape Town on Tuesday, allowing local businesses to establish a dedicated network connection to AWS for the first time.
The news was revealed exclusively to Business Times by Peter Desantis, AWS vicepresident and global head of infrastructure, in an interview during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas last week.
“Having AWS Direct Connect in the country allows customers based in South Africa to have dedicated, reliable, and high-bandwidth connectivity to the Amazon Global Network, bypassing the public internet,” he said.
“Customers can connect to all AWS infrastructure regions around the world — except China — from Johannesburg and Cape Town, and their traffic will remain in the Amazon backbone network throughout the entire journey.
“One of the main requests we have had from South African customers is to help them reduce costs and improve network performance from their on-premises environments to AWS infrastructure regions around the world,” he said.
“This is the first time that the Amazon network has come to Africa and means customers now have local access to redundant and diverse network infrastructure.”
The service is a precursor to building Amazon data centres in South Africa. Seattle-based Amazon’s major competitor in cloud-hosting services, its near-neighbour Microsoft, is set to open data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town in February. Amazon has not yet announced specific plans for local data centres, but Desantis says it is only a matter of time.
Lots of work needed
“It’s just a matter of prioritisation. When we build a region, it’s a very substantial investment. We build multiple sites, with three availability zones, metro fibre connecting all those, and dependable power supply. There is a lot of reliability we build into a region that other folks don’t.
“Across South Africa, we need to do quite a lot of work to get that infrastructure in place. But we’re excited because we think there’s a lot of business and growth in South Africa and it’s a matter of how quickly we can figure it out.”
In the meantime, he said, the Direct Connect service would make AWS’s full cloud services available to customers.
The formal arrival of Amazon in South Africa is long overdue — the foundation of AWS’s cloud service was developed here. Desantis set up the company’s first developer centre in Cape Town in 2006, and put together the original team of software engineers that built the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud web service, or EC2.
This year, AWS is on track to deliver $18billion (about R245-billion) in revenue, up by 50% over 2016. It now represents more than 10% of Amazon’s total revenue, is growing faster than the retail business, and delivering far higher profit margins.
The cloud over Table Mountain
Desantis worked full time on the project in South Africa from 2006 to 2008, and regularly returned to oversee development for the next three years. He says he still visits when he can, and cannot overstate the role that the Cape Town team has played.
“We realised that to build things we wanted to build, we couldn’t hire all the people in Seattle, and we had to make big investments in other places. It was important to go to an area where we could make long-term investment, and the most important thing for longterm investment is people.
“Cape Town wasn’t a booming tech town, but it had a lot of important elements. One was a really good set of student programmes, at the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and other universities. Through expats working at Amazon, we were also able to identify local folks and attract key leaders.”
The initial team comprised eight people, and has grown to several thousand. It is still one of the biggest sources of employment for software engineers in the Cape Town area.
“When I got there I was immediately impressed by the team. I felt I was right back home. If I was blindfolded and didn’t see the beautiful scenery, I would have thought I was in Seattle.”
Take a bow, Cape Town
Desantis sings the praises of UCT computer science graduate James Greenfield, who has headed the facility since 2012.
“One of the key things was that I had to be very convinced that the team was viable in the long term. We needed a local leader for the long term, and James has been great. He was one of the key developers when I got there, and his potential and passion was immediately evident.”
The Cape Town site was opened at the same time as one in Edinburgh, Scotland, and today there are developer centres around the world. They are an integral component of the growth of AWS, but all owe a debt to Cape Town, says Desantis.
“AWS has invested heavily in remote developer centres, and a large part of their success is the initial success we had in Cape Town. It was a role model for what we wanted. Over time, other support teams have moved in, but that initial developer team was really successful.
“When we think about building teams for success now, we think about the right leaders, the right talent pool, and a strong set of university programmes to build talent. You can do a lot once the people are in place, but the skills have to come through the front door.
“Finally, if a team has strong ownership of things, it can be very successful. The Cape Town team owns specific parts of the service infrastructure, and is empowered to make decisions and work directly with customers. That is what makes our remote developer centres so successful.”
If I was blindfolded I would have thought I was in Seattle Peter Desantis AWS head of infrastructure