Stacking your Deck: Taking an open Approach to Cloud Infrastructure in West Africa

By Oluwafiropo Tobi Ogundare, Territory Sales Lead for West Africa and Mauritius at Red Hat

Across West Africa, organisations are speeding ahead with their cloud adoption and migration plans. Accelerated adoption represents plenty of economic potential for the region. In Nigeria alone, cloud adoption could yield N30.2 trillion in economic value by 2033 as the technology is used to drive innovation, improve productivity, and help scale businesses.

An important part of the cloud journey is building and managing cloud environments, as well as looking at the platforms businesses use to do so. Given the growing complexity of IT operations, organisations need to think about how they can best approach their public and private clouds and the complexity that comes with them.

A Need to Manage Complexity
To be clear, not every organisation is obliged to customise their IT infrastructure. Many can rely on managed solutions and the vendors that offer them to fully accommodate their requirements, as well as manage and allocate their resources where needed. However, every organisation does need to know what goes into building and looking after a cloud environment.

Cloud management is how an organisation orchestrates all the products and services that operate in their environments and stipulates the rules that encompass those operations. Typically, organisations would accomplish this with software deployed as a virtual machine (VM), with APIs serving as the connecting wires between all resources. That interconnectivity relies on an operating system (OS) that commands and deploys management tools, regardless of the type of cloud organisations are using.

Remember, cloud adoption is a move towards complexity. Today, IT technologies encompass the public cloud, on-premise servers, edge devices, containers, and VMs. Thus, migrating applications can be a very complicated exercise and requires multiple processes and skills. Not only do organisations need the right platforms to manage their IT estates, but those platforms must also be capable of accommodating that estate while leaving room for further modernisation.

Doing things the Open Way
Enterprises have two choices when it comes to cloud management. They can leverage proprietary solutions or go the open source route. Many assume open source is the exception to IT rather than the rule, but the truth is that the open road underpins the vast majority of cloud-native technologies. Kubernetes is an industry standard for managing cloud-native workloads. And OpenStack, one of the most active open source projects in the world, lets organisations create and manage their own cloud infrastructure with a complete set of tools and resources.

Looking more closely at OpenStack, its distributed architecture and modular approach with its use of APIs is what enables a high level of customisation. The resulting infrastructure also serves as a robust foundation on which organisations can run other services, most notably the Red Hat OpenShift container platform that lets enterprises build, deploy, and run applications in any environment and at scale.

All of this reflects the intrinsic benefits of open source. Interoperability and agility will be what lets enterprises across West Africa not just customise their infrastructure based on their needs and long-term visions, but also distinguish themselves from competitors and establish themselves as leaders in their respective industries and markets.

About that long-term Vision…
The open source model, and its relevance to enterprises, is evolving rapidly amidst the focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) enabled technologies. Platforms that can handle AI/ML workloads, while facilitating modular architecture and boasting a full suite of supported services are the go-to for any organisation that wants to enhance their systems and value offering to customers.

Whatever the use case, AI/ML and data science require large amounts of computational resources to handle model training and large-scale data processing.

And open source projects are responding to this need. A new feature recently added to OpenStack was support for vGPU live migrations in Nova, the platform’s core computing service. This lets organisations move GPU workloads from one server to another with minimal impact on the workloads. Features for hosting AI and high-performance workloads demonstrate a forward-thinking mindset, anticipating what organisations will leverage these platforms for and contributing to an AI-enabled future.

Cloud infrastructure in West Africa doesn’t have to be defined by rigidity. In fact, that is the last thing enterprises should want. Instead, an open approach can transform how enterprises can leverage the full power and potential of the cloud.