@ Mich, Phares, Aki, Sam, Paul and John Gitau, thank you for sharing your insights, you bring across very valid points, i hope Dr. Ndemo will respond to some of the questions thrown into his court, @ John, i think positive criticism is acceptable and plays a great role in advancement of communities, feel free to carry on with the posts even as we prepare to get into day 5. Best Regards On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 6:24 PM, John Gitau <jgitau@gmail.com> wrote:
- As Kenya's technical community, we should be stimulated by excellence. I see it every day and get very stimulated. Complaining, whining will slow you down, guys are moving forward. People confuse 'cloud' with big names, anyone here that has run 'xen' or 'vmware' at home or wherever has technically run a cloud, mpls is a cloud. This is how people learn. - We help each other to be great - the government here is one of us, and they of late seem to be showing a very high performance culture. If it is indeed true that a data centre build or whatever cloud thing is outsourced to google then obviously we should be concerned. - Hosting a small site with your photos can and should be done as close to you as possible. Preferably in your house - yes I also don't like facebook much, the idea of my parents, aunts,employer and friends in a single social group never appealed to me - go google+). So scan your photos, share them from a small server pc at home,write your favorite recipe, host your neighbors, if it's hard to get bandwidth, maybe arrange for community bandwidth/wifi to extend it, do whatever it takes to move forward. Start small, share security cameras, have free voip in your estate, do something. In this age of cheap bandwidth, mpesa and commodity hardware, all of us should have an ecommerce site. Start small. - Cloud - yes I believe a good cloud solution is possible with all the bells and whistles in Kenya, the technologies are widely available, some are free. This happens to be the sort of thing I do - build networks and now apparently design data centers - and while immediate needs and questions might not be easy to address, We shouldn't unnecessarily criticize every single step people take forward. - On the other hand- If for instance a company like airtel,zuku,safaricom or <insert big name here> wanted to build a data center in Uganda for whatever reason and backed up our data there, would I be happy? no, I want my data here and want assurance that it is somewhere with someone I can call and audit and feel safe. (there's an unconfirmed rumour that Rwandan's insisted MTN not move a single 'bit' of Rwandase data out of their borders) forcing them to plan for 'In Rwanda DC's. - There honestly is data about me I wouldn't want shared with people ouside our borders. What if there was war and all my bio data is 'over there'? - Technical knowhow can be easilly resolved by those in the know training/guiding/mentoring those 'who are interested in knowing'. AFNOG does a very good job of that for africa, so does IHUB and other forums - incidentally this should eb a technical 'learning' list:-).
JGitau
On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 9:59 AM, Michuki Mwangi <michuki@swiftkenya.com> wrote:
@Aki,
Am going to play the devils advocate here :).
On 7/5/11 7:51 AM, aki wrote:
Why would the govt promote cloud computing as a national importance when they gave out the digitization project to Google? Our data now sits on Google servers!
Why not?.
I believe that those interested in cloud services should shun these until the govt leads on such,
Please tell me is there any local company in Kenya that can provide services that can compete or match Google's cloud services?.
I also think that before we proceed on any further discussions, we need to know why the Govt choose Google as the cloud service.
Maybe we should compare it to this. Why is the Govt going for VW Passats yet we have the Nyayo Pioneer car idling somewhere or am i mistaken?.
But on a more serious note - has anyone build an infrastructure here and am not talking about a Data Center with all the bells and whistles. Am talking about a service framework that is scalable and robust enough to make the GoK think twice about giving their services to that provider?. Here am not talking about the scale of Google am talking small enough to handle GoK but scalable to handle all of E.A Govts and more without breaking.
We are lacking in many extends from both technical expertise (and am sure many folks will differ with me on this one) and more driven by the $ than by the technology to care to know how to build it all together.
We have been quick to say that why reinvent the wheel in so many of the forums here (including myself). However, the downside of not reinventing the wheel is we take the wheel and use it without understanding why it was built that way - we just know that we need it and we use it (see Joomla discussion).
In conclusion, we have quickly to making revenues from a technology we barely understand. As a result, those who understand it better will always outcompete the rest of us.
If you think about it - long before there was cloud folks had something called rocketmail and hotmail. Then came yahoo and even then their business model was a mystery to many in actual sense online advertising was still a distant concept in 1997 - 2000. But see what they lead to today. So basically they made the wheel and improved on the wheel and now its no longer a wheel but a mirage of a wheel.
My 2 cents.
Michuki.
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