[ad_1]
JOHANNESBURG – Last week, I attended the Amazon Web Services Summit (AWS) in Cape Town. It was the third event of its kind in the city and attendance jumped from about 600 IT developers several years ago to more than 2000 last week. It is not surprising that the demand for the event is on the rise, especially as the presence of Amazon in Cape Town has quietly increased, apparently to several thousand people. Of course, the expanding South African base of Amazon was not accidentally born. Pinkham, a pioneer of the Internet in South Africa, was previously vice president of engineering at Amazon and a legendary actor behind the company's incursion and blast of the cloud market. . He will also become vice president of engineering at Twitter for a short time. At the AWS Summit, I spoke with Geoff Brown, Regional Director of Sub-Saharan Africa for Amazon Web Services, to discuss the presence of the company and its future projects in Africa. South and in the rest of the continent. – Gareth van Zyl
It is a pleasure to welcome Geoff Brown, Regional Director of Sub-Saharan Africa for Amazon Web Services. Geoff, everyone has heard of Amazon, but what does AWS do exactly?
AWS is a company that was launched in 2006. We offer cloud computing technology services as a paid model – this is not a contract. When we started, there were very rudimentary technology services like messaging, queuing, and those kinds of things. This has taken the path of storage and computation, and today, 125 different technology services have generally added four or five new features to the platform each day.
And you left Germany to badume the role here? 19659003] Yes. So I moved from California to manage our business in Germany and then asked if I would consider relocating the family for another move in August of last year (to because of our investments we were making in Africa). My trip to Amazon has been in many different places around the world. Amazon likes to move people around to try to help train new employees quickly.
Tell us about some of these investments in Africa that you just mentioned? Amazon has a big presence, especially here in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Yes, that's right. We have thousands of employees in South Africa since 2004 and it is an essential function for our EC2 development, our computing platform. There is premium support for our customers here. We also have retail call centers [in South Africa]. On the commercial and public side of the AWS, the investments are obviously in mbadive hires and I think that today there are 40 or 50 vacancies on our jobs board. From the point of view of human investment, we are expanding teams to meet customer demands. But with our investment in infrastructure, we launched a network (part of the backbone of Amazon) called Direct Connect in Johannesburg and Cape Town in December. It was a pretty big investment. Now customers can immediately compare their data centers with Amazon's data centers around the world. More recently, we announced our acceleration of our CDN (Content Delivery Network), CloudFront. We announced it in Johannesburg a few weeks ago, and today we announced the Cape Plan. What's interesting about this is that it's more than a CDN. This is a DDoS protection service. This is an application firewall service. This is a set of services to execute code at the periphery, called Lambda. So you start to see that architecture [cloud] involves moving capacity to the periphery and there are other examples of investments in infrastructure.
CDN is Content Delivery Network, so you improve latency in this area?
Yes, so we estimate and have seen, since we actually launched these two locations, a 75% increase in capacity in terms of reduced latency. This is a pretty big impact on application performance for SA companies. Whether you're streaming live content or static content In a mobile environment, you really want to have the lowest possible latency for your user. It's a very big impact. This also has a significant impact on revenue and the adoption of certain applications.
I'm talking to you here at the AWS Summit in Cape Town, and I just watched some of the presenters in the opening speech and you have very large business clients in Africa from South. Pick n Pay was up and did a conversation. There was also Mix Telematics, who gave a very interesting talk about their global operations and their use of AWS. What is your growth in South Africa?
We are very pleased with the speed with which the company grew up here. When you look at worldwide activity, our last quarter was a $ 22 billion rate, up 49%. It's staggering. We are very blessed, I suppose, to have this luxury. What's even more interesting is that if you go back two previous quarters, the growth rates were 45% and 42%, so even the law of big numbers is not at stake here. We are currently seeing an acceleration upwards, even faster since the adoption. The acceleration, as I have already mentioned, with models in California, Germany, Australia, Japan, etc., is really the same. So, you see just an absolute acceleration of the use. I think the Cape Town AWS Summit is a very good example. I was not there at that time, but the summit had only 600 people three years ago and we now have thousands, so we're very excited about the rapid growth of # 39; company.
I was sitting in the auditorium I think they said it was about 2,000 people attending today?
I think it was more than 2,000 people. I do not have the exact number yet, but I think it has exceeded this number significantly.
Let's talk about the Summit. What is the importance of this Summit for Amazon in terms of spreading what you do? Obviously, it is growing by leaps and bounds, are there many developers from SA and from all over Africa?
Mainly South Africa. Well, we have people all over Africa. We have people from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, I think it's a pan-sub-Saharan Africa event. I do not know the statistics in particular, but I think that SA will constitute the majority of the participants. This is our first event. It is the event where we do a lot of education. We enable our customers to speak, whether it's the startups we have in Startup Central at the expo, or partners to showcase the new technology they've built on AWS, or the keynote speakers , as you mentioned, get on stage and talk about what they 've done in the last 12 months. It is important for us from this point of view because there is a lot of education and the way we tend to educate, that is by letting our clients tell their story. This has always been the model of AWS and its success has been proven, and it's very similar to what we do on our global event, called Reinvent. At the end of November, you will hear from 400 to 500 customers on stage talking about virtually every possible workload.
Last year, I interviewed Chris Pinkham, a South African, who became quite legendary, I think, within Amazon. For a company like Amazon, how important was it, in terms of what you do now with the cloud?
I do not know Chris personally but when I arrived at the Cape Town office in August, he obviously left the company. But when you look at the history of our relationship with SA, and why we even have such a great talent engineering office here, it started in 2004. And a lot of the original idea and the ability to work on the EC2 development was part of the background of Chris. It does not hurt that Cape Town has a great university system that creates a lot of good engineers and computer science graduates. This ended up being a perfect place for us to build an important base, and today it is one of the largest offices, for Amazon, around the world.
You say that it is one of the biggest. What is the biggest? Is Cape Town in the top 5, top 10?
I do not have all the data but if you think about where the big call centers and large engineering companies are located, obviously Seattle is the headquarters. But if you go to Dublin, if you go to (I suppose) Australia, there are other places where we have important call centers and technical support. I guess it must be somewhere in the top 10.
For local business people who listen to this podcast. What advice would you give them in terms of access to the cloud?
Try to demystify it as quickly as possible. I remember one of my clients who once came to Seattle for an executive briefing and, coming out of the room, he said, "I do not know what I was so afraid of." What it really said to me, it's "… "The experience does not really cost much, and there is a free level and you can even experiment with the use of the cloud and use it on the free-tier, but that's it." Initial experience and this "ah-ha moment" that can help you get started. It's usually how most businesses start their journey. They are the ones who wait and debate, and they have an internal thrust, and they sometimes become paralyzed for months or years. So, my advice would be, do not be afraid of that. It's actually quite easy.
Geoff, thank you very much for taking the time to chat with me today.
Thank you very much.
[ad_2]
Source link
