Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud

Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
restofworld.org

When does it become feasible for poorer countries to start building them?

> 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 cloud infrastructure with servers in data centers in Nigeria and South Africa in 2024

But the servers will also be priced in a more stable currency than the naira, so I'm not sure what the win is. I also googled "nigeria electric grid" to learn if they'd see how much pricing would be driven by inflation, but before I got there, saw that the national grid had 12 collapses in 2024. Generators and fuel are also priced in more stable currencies.

The data sovereignty argument is interesting. I know there are EU companies that only use EU data centers. We might see (if it's not already a thing) AWS have a nominally independent EU subsidiary that can ignore US regulators.

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 about S3 and Kubernetes being AWS-like, but those that offer only Virtual Servers and FTP space are competitors to "boring" web hosting services, no matter how often they use the word cloud.

It's cool that these services also exist in Nigeria, and I think it's right that Nigerian websites use Nigerian infrastructure. But the article does a poor job talking about it

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 stay on the continent, but go via London or Marseille instead. And, also worth keeping in mind, from Lagos to those destinations, Joburg or Cape Town are actually double the distance, even though they might 'sound' closer.

So, yeah, I wish everyone involved all the best, but it will be an uphill battle. Convenience and latency make 'big tech' pretty hard to avoid, and 'strong crypto' would be my bet over 'local facilities', but, yeah...