Cloud computing is a delicate frontier with the big tech companies fighting for market share. The Cloud has become an integral part of our lives since it is the basis for a lot of services we enjoy in our daily lives.
Cloud services usually have ‘edge’ sites which contain servers that caches data. They are used to provide low latency and that is why they are important for a cloud service.
Recently, Amazon announced plans of setting up an edge location in Kenya and this was a big move to provide AWS customers here with low latency workflows. Interesting enough, Microsoft had announced an edge location here in Nairobi.
On August 27th, Microsoft announced 31 new Azure edge sites of which Nairobi was among the new edge sites that were set up. Other African cities that got an Azure edge site include Lagos and Cairo (this is an upcoming edge site).
According to Microsoft, the benefits of edge sites include accelerating performance and experience when using content or services like Azure or Office 365 which a lot of people use. Apparently they can provide upto 10x the acceleration access to consume cloud based content and services from Microsoft.
Just like Amazon, Microsoft has set South Africa as their Azure region while Nairobi and Lagos have edge sites. Big tech has seen the opportunity of having such infrastructure in the continent and it seems like they are focusing in areas with a lot of software development just like how it has been shown in the GitHub Octoverse report.
