CLOUD NINE
Web services unit is hiring local staff for what could become Africa’s tech hub
Amazon is expanding its operations in South Africa.
● Amazon Web Services, for the first time in South Africa, is putting down physical roots to bring its operations closer to local customers, a move that will provide jobs and could be a sign that it is getting closer to setting up data centres in the country.
It has set up “Points of Presence” for Amazon CloudFront, a global content delivery network, in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
AWS, the cloud-computing division of Amazon.com, already has a massive developer centre in Cape Town, and in December announced a local presence for its Direct Connect service, which allows local businesses to establish a dedicated network connection to the AWS cloud in Europe.
CloudFront goes one step further, allowing businesses to deliver content from the cloud to their local customers at high speed and with high security. It also brings closer the likelihood of AWS setting up its own data centres in South Africa.
“The impact of AWS entering a market is big,” said Roy Illsley, principal analyst for global research and consulting firm Ovum. “They pull in regional interest and this elevates the status of the host city or country. I expect South Africa to become the launchpad for Africa.
“From a technology perspective this is good news, as it will make South Africa a technology hub and will spawn other adjacent technologies, like near-cloud storage, that provides alternative storage within close proximity to the cloud provider.”
Local analysts agree that AWS will have a major impact in South Africa.
“Amazon has been hugely disruptive to the US economy, from its days as an e-commerce start-up to the retail and cloud computing giant it is today,” said Jonathan Tullett, a senior analyst for IDC sub-Saharan Africa. “That impact is felt globally to differing degrees, but it is clear that the company only enters markets it feels it can dominate by offering highly competitive services. It has a significant impact on entire ecosystems, from end users and developers through to hosting, cloud and service providers.”
Whereas the existing Direct Connect service helps businesses to connect to the global cloud, Amazon CloudFront will allow them to deliver services like data, videos and applications from the cloud. It also firmly integrates South Africa into the global AWS infrastructure, which includes 54 Availability Zones — the AWS term for data centre locations — in 18 geographic regions.
CloudFront gives this network a further 117 Points of Presence in 56 cities across 25 countries. South Africa will become the 26th country, with Johannesburg and Cape Town taking the number of cities to 58.
“Johannesburg went live on Thursday night, with Cape Town following in the next few weeks,” Geoff Brown, AWS head for subSaharan Africa, told Business Times in an exclusive interview this week. “Within the infrastructure, our content delivery network will deliver dynamic and static content to reduce latency at the edge of the network.
“We’re also adding in services like the AWS web application firewall, a product called AWS Shield, to protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks, and Lambda@Edge, architecture that allows companies to test and run code without having to own the servers that traditionally housed code.
“This is the first globally available public cloud service that allows computing in the country. It allows intelligent management of code and takes the weight off the origin networks. That in turn will reduce the cost of implementing capacity at the edge instead of forcing customers all the way back to the origin.”
CloudFront is used by global brands in sectors like media and entertainment, advertising, gaming, financial services, social media, health and education. The online music streaming service Spotify, which recently launched in South Africa, uses it to deliver both the app and software updates to users.
Aerobotics, a Cape Town-based company that uses drones and satellites to monitor crops and warn farmers about potential risks through data analytics, uses CloudFront to deliver content to farmers globally. It will now have the capability of getting critical information to farmers more quickly.
Online travel company Travelstart will use it to deliver price comparisons and bookings more rapidly and ward off cyberattacks.
At the AWS Summit in Cape Town on July 12, Pick n Pay and Mix Telematics are expected to present case studies in how they are using the service.
As it rolls out CloudFront, AWS is expected to rapidly grow its local workforce. It employs several thousand South Africans in Cape Town, where it set up its first developer centre in 2006. The centre is famed for building the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which laid the foundation for AWS’s cloud service. It also has an office in Johannesburg, and its website this week advertised openings for more than 50 jobs in the two cities.
“AWS right now is in pretty massive expansion,” said Brown. “We’re hiring account managers, partner managers, solution architects, people managing compliance and regulatory issues, support agents, marketing folks, located in Johannesburg and Cape Town. We’re continually looking for great people and constantly hiring.”
The developer centre was set up in Cape Town in the first place because of “a fantastic base of university students and data scientists”, he said.
“We partner with a training academy called the Explore Data Science Academy, which expects to graduate 100 data scientists this year. We’ve provided our platform to help them with machine learning and artificial intelligence training, so that they can become more proficient and go into the job market and create the next generation of innovation in South Africa.”
He would not be pressed on the location of the Amazon infrastructure, nor the investment involved. He acknowledged, however, that “because of the infrastructure required to push the level of content we deliver, it’s obviously pretty substantial, especially when you look at the content being delivered
Joburg went live on Thursday night, with Cape Town following in the next few weeks
Geoff Brown
Amazon Web Services head for sub-Saharan Africa
A full-blown [AWS] region could be opened in South Africa to serve the African market
Roy Illsley
Analyst for global research and consulting firm Ovum
by large media companies”.
He was unable to give an indication of Amazon.com e-commerce services coming to South Africa, but pointed out that the parent company was also a customer of AWS.
“I’m sure this would be an enabling technology for our retail business, but it would also be an enabling technology for any other company in South Africa that wants to have those capabilities.”
The topic no one at Amazon is willing to address is a time frame for setting up a local data centre, or Availability Zone. But the clues are emerging.
“AWS has a policy of being driven by demand,” said Illsley. “If there is demand for a service, then they build and deliver it. If the demand for AWS services continues to grow in South Africa and Africa as a whole, and customers are happy to use South Africa as the gateway, then eventually a full-blown region could be opened in South Africa to serve the African market.”
Tullett agreed: “Amazon has been clear that it will follow the money, and when the revenue justifies a local data centre, it will build one.”