US hyperscale cloud face-off in South Africa

Four US tech giants offer cloud services with availability zones in South Africa for optimal performance, lower costs, and full local support.

Businesses benefit from migrating their applications, online systems, and data to the cloud. Firstly, it can significantly decrease upfront capital expenditure on IT equipment.

Businesses don’t need to install, run, and secure their own physical servers and data centre infrastructure, and they can significantly downsize their local equipment.

Consequently, IT teams have less maintenance to perform and can focus more on optimising the hardware and software used locally.

In addition, reliable cloud computing services have significant data and service redundancy in place, with dispersed infrastructure that can step in if there are issues at the first location.

Finally, cloud computing allows a business to scale its computing resources quickly up or down as required.

Below are more details about the history of local operations, features, and major customers of the four hypescale US cloud companies operating in South Africa.


Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the oldest and biggest US cloud services provider in the world.

AWS has been in South Africa for over two decades, with a Capetonian team developing one of its key components — Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) —  in the early 2000s.

AWS started building its business client base in South Africa in 2004, but its first local region only went live in Cape Town in April 2020. At the time, it was Amazon’s 23rd region in the world.

This region supports three availability zones that can run several instances and support dozens of AWS services.

As explained by Coursera, AWS boasts computer resources and services for constructing apps quickly with pay-as-you-use prices at per-second rate.

Users are able to rent a configurable server on AWS, which they can run just like a physical on-site server.

Among AWS’s most noteworthy customers in South Africa are Absa, Flutterwave, Jumo, Mix Telematics, TymeBank, and Wesbank.


Google Cloud

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the latest US cloud services provider to launch a local region in South Africa, with its first location in Johannesburg going live in January 2024.

Google Cloud was originally called App Engine when it launched in 2008.

Google Cloud provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. It charges customers on a per-minute basis.

According to Coursera, GCP is mainly used to develop and maintain original applications that can be published from Google’s hyper-scale data centres.

Google Cloud’s customers in South Africa include Africa Digital Group, Deloitte Africa, FNB, Healthbridge, Liquid C2, and MTN.

Editorial credit: Tada Images / Shutterstock.com


Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is AWS’s biggest rival on the global stage.

It rolled out its first local enterprise-grade data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town in March 2019.

Three Azure availability zones were launched at the Johannesburg region (South Africa North) in October 2021.

Microsoft also made its Dynamics 365 and Power Platform generally available in its South African data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Azure provides public cloud services charged on a per-minute basis, with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions being key offerings.

These are most often used for analytics, virtual computing, storage, and networking.


Oracle

The Oracle Cloud Johannesburg Region went live in January 2022, becoming the company’s 37th region.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers easy migration of IT workloads and data platforms to the cloud or building new cloud-native applications.

The company also offers a wide range of application modernisation and cloud strategies to help African organisations operate with global competitiveness.

Oracle’s major customers in South Africa include Accenture Africa, Airports Company South Africa, the International Data Corporation, and Telkom.

Editorial credit: josefkubes / Shutterstock.com

 

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