Product Engineering: My Grand Africa Cloud Idea (Part I: The Problem and the African Character)
Why am I writing this and majorly why I am sharing this? My answer is both faith and logic-based. My faith-based answer: “Then the Lord answered me and said, “Write the vision And engrave it plainly on [clay] tablets So that the one who reads it will run. — Habakkuk 2:2” This scripture suggests the power of creating/action/executing what is written in a bit, shape or form. My logic-based answer is I am not afraid of this being executed by another party, I would like to work with people who have this overall goal to build this hardware-software or a finer-tuned version of this project. My overall goal is to be a good operator or CTO so I am not out here outrightly seeking glory.
Glossary
NGN: Naira, The Official currency of Nigeria.
VPS: Virtual Private Servers. These are majorly where the code of this world runs from.
Relational Databases: Imagine an Excel sheet, filled with formulas that link columns.
Petabytes: which is a unit of data which is 1,000 terabytes.
Problem Case
The entire sinking economic strength of Nigeria and a few African countries has predominately indicated that the Dollar is far superior than I ever credited it. Leading the development of various products, and having acted in a supporting engineering role to a Senior Engineer who championed was in charge of infrastructure, I understood the value of the Dollar.
The cost of my infra on my product is 12$ for a 2GB RAM Linux Instance on DigitalOcean, which in 2022 at 423 NGN for a Dollar is 5076 NGN, in 2023 1$ = 638.7 NGN which means that my infra cost 7664.4 NGN, today in the year of my Lord 2024, 1$ = 1400 NGN (as at May 29th, 2024) which brings server cost to 16800 NGN. Technically this means that in the space of two years, the cost of my server that has not been scaled cost 3 times the price it cost in 2022. Now I am frugal so in other places where there we could pay for additional infra we most likely hack it. For example, in monitoring, we use Sentry and Slack Channel to track bugs among many other things.
Now the Nigerian situation is dire in that the cost of living is almost 4Xed too, so that means the funds available for building are substantially purposed to cater for man's most basic needs (The Trinity of needs). This means that the technology industry that is built on the novelty of building and tinkering could potentially be wiped out due to the cost of building. Unlike the privelance of Heroku applications where the freemium offer was encouraging builders to build at a fraction of the cost. Since the acquisition of Heroku by SalesForce, Heroku's freemium offering has been halted. Nature abors a vacuum and a few solutions have come to provide a way for builders to build albeit with limited computing resources but Indie hackers and builders in Africa will be grateful for such, I know I am.
Africa’s Unique Advantage
To me the glaring nature of Africa’s Advantage is its peninsular nature, the African Continent is bounded on the West, East and South by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans respectively, I will revert to this later and explain how it is one of Africa’s Geographical advantage.
The economic penury of the majority of African Countries is a potential advantage with regards to cost (I assume being backed by the American Dollar). The disadvantage of Africa is its lack of organization, a well-established backwards, yet critically active corruption syndicate that potentially serves as the political leadership of the majority of promising enterprising labour force.
However, the goal is to identify countries with the most forward-thinking leadership, the most stable infrastructure and the highest maintenance culture in the Continent. Using this yardstick it is obvious that this grand plan is actionable.
I know a lot of my assumptions are shallow and do not have enough due diligence but it is informed by research nonetheless, countries with political stability are few and sparing but they exist. I could list a few but it might be the grace is greener on the other side experience as an African, however, I trust that as an Expat the experience irrespective should be greener.
Geography suggests that serious African countries would and could take advantage of its geological advantage, such that Countries with High lands that experience some special kind of Air movement due to the landmass and height suggest a certain level of advantage in power generation. Same with the West, South and East of Africa specific advantage of power generation via Offshore Generators. The above coupled with hydroelectric power potential across most countries across the coast and some landlocked countries via damming. These are not the aims of my grand Idea but I think elements of the above show the level of infrastructure I think of when I think of countries that could be expanded from a select country.
This mildly shows the details of the imperative advantage and the drawbacks of the African Play. In the next Part, I will share the solution and the steps.
