By Christopher Saul, Territory Sales Lead for East Africa at Red Hat
Clouds are brewing over Kenya, and companies are noticing. Earlier this year, Oracle announced plans to establish a public cloud region in Nairobi, making it the company’s second region in Africa after Johannesburg, and highlighting the strength of its business in the country. Oracle’s expansion plans go hand in hand with the overall rate of cloud adoption on the continent, with one survey finding that companies are running around 45% of their workloads on public cloud.
While many businesses may face questions about which workloads and applications to migrate, moving to the cloud requires them to rethink their approach to software development. Part of the cloud mindset is understanding how cloud-native development impacts application delivery, which is critical for sustaining the pace of innovation in a market like Kenya.
The era of cloud-native applications
As of right now, many IT and development teams are in the business of building cloud-native applications. That means they’re using a framework that enables applications to scale out horizontally, so they can reside and run on different servers and locations. Cloud applications are made up of microservices. They run in containers and are connected via APIs. Importantly, they support different languages and frameworks, giving developers the necessary freedom to innovate and experiment.
Africa’s appetite for cloud-native development is growing as the ecosystem aims to build its talent base. It’s why groups such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is part of the Linux Foundation, have set out to train African tech professionals to design, build and configure cloud-native apps for Kubernetes, making them more sought-after locally and globally.
When we discuss cloud-native applications, we must remember there’s a difference between cloud-native and cloud-based. While the latter may make use of cloud infrastructure, these applications don’t necessarily take full advantage of it, typically because they were initially developed on-premises.
Cloud-based applications may not have undergone the architectural modifications needed for a successful migration to a cloud server, which means they could have portability challenges, be more expensive to run and require more manual interventions. Those interventions are developer productivity killers. Teams need to be able to spend their days working to generate business value, rather than having to fight just to keep the lights on.
A cloud development strategy is a platform strategy
Not having to worry about managing servers, application development teams can package their code in containers for deployment. Serverless architecture means teams can deploy apps wherever they want, which is especially useful for enterprises that may have limited access to IT infrastructure or that predominantly rely on public cloud services for hosting.
Jumping between environments and adopting a hybrid approach, Kenyan enterprises need a consistent platform on which they can build and run their applications. Container platforms like OpenShift standardise the model for the entire software development lifecycle and offer features such as centralised administration that let teams monitor and keep track of all of their container clusters across their IT estates. A positive trend among platform vendors is partnering with cloud service providers to further enhance their product offerings, as is the case with Red Hat and Oracle. Their collaboration aims to facilitate the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into enterprise applications and further optimise them.
Platforms define the cloud computing experience more than anything else. They sit at the centre of how app developers need to rethink their approach to applications, helping them stay agile and flexible in what is a highly competitive and fast-moving business environment. Enterprises across Kenya shouldn’t fear going ‘cloud-first’, not when they have the right ideas in mind and the help of an ecosystem that wants to help them. With the right approach towards going cloud-native, they can set themselves up for future success.
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Also Read: Red Hat Named a Leader in Multicloud Container Platforms by Forrester