kili seed
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
KILI.IOCore cloud infrastructure
for African markets
KILI.IOAmazon Web Services API-compatible compute power and storage for Africa
• "I think the market will be receptive to the project." - AWS employee in Cape Town
•"I would rather have a best effort ec2 than the other crap Mweb, RSAweb etc. tries to sell as cloud hosting." - David McLennan, Founder TravelGround (Cape Town startup)
• "I would pay for the service if these were guaranteed. Last I checked, Safaricom offered some cloud IaaS setup that simply did not match up to competition at all, so you definitely have an opportunity in Kenya." Morris Mwanga (Kenyan developer currently paying $380/month for high memory large instance on ec2)
NEXT GENERATION AFRICAN STARTUPS
NEEDINFRASTRUCTURE
IS CLOUD NECESSARY IN KENYA... AND THE REST OF AFRICA
• Existing solutions for compute and storage fall into three basic categories:
• In-house data centers typically used by larger organizations
• Domestic hosting/co-location providers are used by established local organizations
• International providers handle most new local web and mobile application backends
IN-HOUSE HOSTING
• Cost - Available only to large enterprises with large budgets
• Disaster Recovery - Enterprises with the budget to do in-house hosting still need offsite DR solutions
• Flexibility - Large IT departments are frequently bypassed by business divisions looking to deploy products without the internal overhead
DOMESTIC PROVIDERS
• Difficult initial setup often requires meeting a salesperson and drafting a contract
• Many providers require company financial data before agreeing to host equipment
• Local equipment costs 30%-40% more than similar equipment in the US
• Uplink costs are very expensive, even for small installations
INTERNATIONAL PROVIDERS • Latency - As applications become more complex, round trip packet delivery times to
Europe or Asia of >100ms becomes more problematic.
• Throttling - Because international connectivity is expensive to ISPs, throttling frequently occurs, further degrading service for local consumers.
• Uptime - Undersea cable outages due to poor oversight, technical problems and even sabotage are now regular occurrences
• Regulation - eHealth and financial data is often protected by governments who do not want to cede regulatory control
• Payments - US or European credit cards are often required for payment
IS CLOUD POSSIBLE IN KENYA... AND THE REST OF AFRICA?
• Electricity - Although local data centers are not globally top-tier, they are very capable of maintaining generators and clean power
• Availability - Cloud computing presumes data center level failure and, via multiple availability zones and regions, high availability can be engineered on lower quality infrastructure
• Connectivity - Kenya Internet Exchange (KIXP) facilitates domestic traffic across all major ISPs and is not throttled like expensive International traffic is. Through ISOC and other groups, African IXPs are set to grow over the next few years.
TECHNOLOGY
• Hardware - High quality non-enterprise brand servers such as Penguin or Silicon Mechanics on SuperMicro using Intel processors
• Networking - Software defined networking (SDN) via Arista Networks or MidoNet in the future
• Software - OpenStack Grizzly on Ubuntu 13.04 as the Host OS. Supported guest operating systems will include Windows and Ubuntu initially.
• Hypervisor - KVM with the option of using vSphere in later phases for hybrid enterprise clouds
PHASE 1
• Small team of 2-3 people
• Single data center (availability zone) in Nairobi with reduced redundancy storage
• Single data center in Cape Town with reduced redundancy storage
PHASE II
• Lean 8-10 person team
• Launch second availability zone in Nairobi for enhanced durability and availability architectures
• New region with dual availability zones in Cape Town
• All regions will be given full durability for storage
PHASE III
• Strong 15-20 person team
• Dual availability zone installations in follow-on cities likely to include either Lagos or Accra
• Lusaka, Kampala, and Dar es Salaam for regulatory reasons will be evaluated for single availability zone installations
• India and Middle East locations will be evaluated
PHASE 1 COSTS• Servers - Approximately $15k for servers, storage and networking in one data center. This
amount of equipment is sufficient to support about 80 'small' virtual services for which Amazon charges $0.065/hour in Ireland/Singapore ($46.80/month per server and $2,340/month at full utilization).
• Incorporation, content license, etc.. - Due to the nature of the ISP market in Kenya, a content license and IP address allocations will be necessary
• Office Equipment - For a team of 3-4, approximately $5k is required for laptops and peripherals.
• Monthly Recurring Costs - $1,500 for data center, $6k for salaries, $500 for overhead
PHASE II & PHASE IIICOST GUIDANCE
• $50k for hardware for each availability zone (4 AZs being $200k in phase II)
• $4k monthly for each AZ
• 8-10 person team for phase II
• 15-20 person team for phase III
BUSINESS MODEL
• Buy hardware, rent it out
• Abstract difficult local business processes into simple billing
• Aggregate ebbs and flows of individual business infrastructure needs into predictable scale
• Retain developers with ability to easily integrate with advanced AWS resources
• Be the provider of choice and conduit to the most innovative tech firms in Africa
GROWING THE MARKET
• Developer Outreach - iHub, 88mph, AITEC conference, etc...
• Hackathons - Free usage tiers for new developers at African hackathons
• NGOs - Require a longer sales cycle but frequently have an intent to ‘buy local’
• Midsized Companies - Focus on disaster recovery and emphasize career development benefits for employees who learn the technology
ADAM NELSONFormer CTO of New York based startup Yipit and numerous technology teams,
Python developer, Amazon Web Services early-adopter, and Nairobi resident
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcnelson
