Amazon, which was originally planned to be named "Ruthless", will see this as an existential threat and use the full force of their Big Tech allies to make sure they have no additional competition. I support their cloud services and know that Big Tech collusion on cloud infrastructure will be nearly impossible to avoid. There must be more decentralized solutions and I'm proud of Nigeria for innovating when Silicon Valley is more worried about consolidating.
Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#12>> She would pay AWS in dollars even as Okra earned in naira because American cloud providers did not accept payments in local currency at the time. The payments to AWS gradually skyrocketed as the naira depreciated around 70% against the dollar between 2020 and 2024. So this is really a forex hedging problem. Although there's an interesting twist with the local colo et al. competition who presumably have capital cos…
It should be really not that hard to price in local denominations. Netflix charges different subscription costs in different countries and they have their infra built on other cloud providers.
Cost of hardware is constant. And the generator, fuel, local electricity, wages etc. CAN be denominated in local currency if the datacenter is local. Obviously if you’re using a server in the US region while sitting in Nigeria, you have no other discourse than pay USD, but for other regions, you should be able to charge in local currencies.
Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#13How fast are cost per unit compute of state-of-the-art datacenters going down? There is the construction cost and the running cost. When does it become feasible for poorer countries to start building them?
Is there a reliable modular datacenter construction technique that allows for easy scaling/expansion? Seems that could have a dramatic impact on bringing these within reach.
Racks.
Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#14> While setting up a data center can cost millions of dollars, small Nigerian teams have found a workaround to this with “colocation” Isn't that what everyone does when starting up a hosting company? Looking at the websites of those companies, I also wouldn't characterize them as AWS or Google Cloud competitors. They offer Virtual Private Servers, FTP storage, maybe an S3 equivalent and Kubernetes. Maybe we can talk…
Yeah...you're not really building an 'AWS' until you're building a hyperscaler and leveraging massive economies of scale. This is more "we're building a service that addressed local reality with local solutions", and that's a pretty awesome thing just in itself.
Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#15> While setting up a data center can cost millions of dollars, small Nigerian teams have found a workaround to this with “colocation” Isn't that what everyone does when starting up a hosting company? Looking at the websites of those companies, I also wouldn't characterize them as AWS or Google Cloud competitors. They offer Virtual Private Servers, FTP storage, maybe an S3 equivalent and Kubernetes. Maybe we can talk…
We're pretty far into the "ditching cloud" hype cycle at the moment. While I think both sides have valid arguments, I think the whole drama tends to lead to unhelpful titles like this one.
Using this same criteria, I'm "building an affordable alternative to AWS" in my house by deploying an HA instance of Proxmox.
Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#16How fast are cost per unit compute of state-of-the-art datacenters going down? There is the construction cost and the running cost. When does it become feasible for poorer countries to start building them?
Is there a reliable modular datacenter construction technique that allows for easy scaling/expansion? Seems that could have a dramatic impact on bringing these within reach.
Sun had their 'modular data center' concept[1], which was a self contained DC in a standard shipping container. You could chain them together. It wasn't obscenely expensive relatively speaking as I recall. I'm not sure if Sun was 'first', but these days there are all sorts of companies that do the same thing (I was recently in one from Delta). I don't know if they are applicable to the reality on the ground in Nigeria.
Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#17> While setting up a data center can cost millions of dollars, small Nigerian teams have found a workaround to this with “colocation” Isn't that what everyone does when starting up a hosting company? Looking at the websites of those companies, I also wouldn't characterize them as AWS or Google Cloud competitors. They offer Virtual Private Servers, FTP storage, maybe an S3 equivalent and Kubernetes. Maybe we can talk…
Yeah...you're not really building an 'AWS' until you're building a hyperscaler and leveraging massive economies of scale. This is more "we're building a service that addressed local reality with local solutions", and that's a pretty awesome thing just in itself.
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Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#18The premise of the article seems a bit flawed: Nigerians are not replicating hyperscalers, but more like building local Hetzners. And that is a fine idea! A big problem for people doing this, however, is that peering is pretty much nonexistent in Nigeria (and, for that matter, most of Africa). So, traffic from, say, Airtel (where a lot of consumers are) to Globacom (which hosts a lot of major businesses), will not st…
Indeed Africa has some of the highest wholesale internet prices in the world.
Having said that, there's a couple of new subsea fiber optic cables going live in Africa imminently. I would expect wholesale prices to drop substantially.
Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#19> She would pay AWS in dollars even as Okra earned in naira because American cloud providers did not accept payments in local currency at the time. > The payments to AWS gradually skyrocketed as the naira depreciated around 70% against the dollar between 2020 and 2024. > Combine that with Nigeria’s economic challenges — rising inflation and forex volatility > Ashiru took things into her own hands, and Okra set up clo…
12 collapses seems incredibly generous, I don't think I ever had fewer than five blackouts in a day for the few months that I stayed there. Maybe it's better for data centers than hotels but I really don't believe that there's a big difference.
Re: Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
#20> She would pay AWS in dollars even as Okra earned in naira because American cloud providers did not accept payments in local currency at the time. > The payments to AWS gradually skyrocketed as the naira depreciated around 70% against the dollar between 2020 and 2024. > Combine that with Nigeria’s economic challenges — rising inflation and forex volatility > Ashiru took things into her own hands, and Okra set up clo…
12 collapses seems incredibly generous, I don't think I ever had fewer than five blackouts in a day for the few months that I stayed there. Maybe it's better for data centers than hotels but I really don't believe that there's a big difference.
Maybe 'the national grid' versus lots of local substations, i.e. all hotels might see 5 a day, but not necessarily at the same times.