TechCentral TechCentral (main feed)

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 AI is turning hardware into a subscription service

For most of business history, buying technology meant owning it. Capital was set aside, servers and laptops were hauled into the building alongside the software licences, and the business then sweated those assets for as long as it practically could. In the age of AI, that logic is starting to…
6 Aug 19 min

TCS+ | iStore Business on why Apple makes sense for SMEs

For small and medium enterprises, technology must do one thing above all else: get out of the way. Unlike large corporations with dedicated IT departments, SMEs run lean – and every hour spent wrestling with systems is an hour not spent on the business itself. In this episode of TechCentral’s…
30 Jul 37 min

TCS | Icasa's rules skip the real bottleneck: ACT

Communications regulator Icasa’s draft rapid deployment regulations – a critical intervention for the sector – risk failing unless the regulator brings municipalities into the process, according to Nomvuyiso Batyi, CEO of the Association of Comms & Technology (ACT). Speaking on the TechCentral Show with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Batyi said…
30 Jul 29 min

TCS+ | A smarter approach to cloud for South African businesses

South African businesses are spending millions on cloud – and many have very little to show for it. That is the uncomfortable starting point for this episode of TCS+, in which Nkosinathi Ndlovu speaks to Joel Chacko, executive head of department for cloud services at Vodacom Business, and Jonathan Oaker,…
28 Jul 21 min

TCS | How Optasia lends billions to people banks can’t see

Optasia is on target to distribute more than US$6-billion in credit across its markets in 2026 – and it carries every cent of the default risk itself. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, CEO Salvador Anglada unpacks how the JSE’s biggest recent fintech listing actually works. Formerly known as…
23 Jul 25 min
All episodes