Interview: Amazon Web Services, and how it got its start in South Africa

Loading player...
Amazon Web Services already has a team of 7 000 people in South Africa, most of them based in Cape Town, but the US cloud computing giant is not done hiring as it ramps up investment in the country.
That’s according to Clive Charlton, head of solution architecture for AWS in sub-Saharan Africa, who explains in the podcast why South Africa – and Cape Town specifically – were so attractive to the Seattle-headquartered leader in hyperscale cloud services originally and why it remains so.
In the podcast, Charlton talks about how Amazon built the elastic computing cloud, or EC2, in Cape Town and how this platform went on to become the underpinnings of what AWS is today.
He also explains why Amazon is moving into a new campus in Cape Town – the data centres won’t be coming along – and whether it has plans to establish offices and data centre infrastructure elsewhere in the country.
Don’t miss the discussion!
19 May 2021 English South Africa Technology · Business

Other recent episodes

TCS+ | How Cloud on Demand helps partners thrive in the AWS ecosystem

Newly minted small businesses often struggle to establish themselves as reliable service providers among their more established competitors. To help cloud-focused business thrive, Amazon Web Services has created the AWS distribution model to support small businesses and help them grow. In this episode of TCS+, Cloud on Demand’s Xenia Rhode…
4 Dec 30 min

TCS | MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita on competition, AI and the future of mobile

South Africa’s big three telecommunications operators have all reported numbers in recent weeks, and the theme is clear: competition in prepaid has intensified sharply. Telkom’s resurgence has put pressure on both MTN and Vodacom, with MTN acknowledging it has “discernibly” lost prepaid market share. This is one of the topics…
28 Nov 57 min

TCS | Dominic Cull on fixing South Africa’s ICT policy bottlenecks

Returning to the TechCentral Show is ICT regulatory expert Dominic Cull, founder of Ellipsis and regulatory advisor to the Internet Service Providers’ Association. Cull recently attended communications minister Solly Malatsi’s policy colloquium in Pretoria – the first under a non-ANC communications minister. Cull says there is a discernibly different tone…
21 Nov 1 hr 04 min