How will the rollout of Microsoft's data centres work, and what can enterprises look forward to?
Axl Mattheus, a cloud solutions architect at Microsoft SA, says the data centres will come online for general availability sometime next year, but large Azure customers, typically spending more than $750 000 a year on Azure, will get 'preview' access.
Speaking at partner event for the enterprise software company Atlassian in Johannesburg this week, he says these large customers can begin experimenting immediately, and will be able to shift and test their workloads to Azure. He says he believes the data centres will be called South Africa North and South Africa West.
He says there are about 200 milliseconds of latency between South African enterprises and the Azure's European data centres, which drops to 160 milliseconds between SA and Cardiff and London, "on a good day".
This high latency has prevented a highly integrated system "unless you moved the whole lot" to a single region. "The experience just falls apart, but now [with the local data centres] we are looking at sub 10 milliseconds, so it changes the game substantially."
Emphasising his comments are his own views and not the company's, Mattheus says Azure's analytics offering will probably not be available at first, because this requires massive infrastructure investment, but infrastructure as a service will be available immediately.
Asked if the local data centres will be 'watered down' versions of their international counterparts, he says all Microsoft data centres will eventually offer the same services, but there is typically an initial lag with new regions.
'They don't want to read the manual'
Mattheus says while there was 'feature parity' between Google Cloud Platform, AWS or Microsoft Azure, he has seen many start-ups choose AWS, because they wanted to try the 'let's figure it out for myself' approach.
"We find that our infrastructure enterprise customers don't necessarily want that. They don't want to read the manual."
Mattheus believes Azure has an advantage over its competitors in the platform-as-a-service space, but their competition is not "sitting on their backsides and doing nothing about it".
"If we look at things like AI, machine learning, IOT, containers as a service, that kind of thing - maybe we have a little bit of an advantage, but in a couple of years from now, there'll be feature parity."
The data centres will be for all countries "below the Sahara", but South Africa will be the biggest market initially.
Top 20 customers
Financial services institutions are among Microsoft's biggest customers - Mattheus says its top 20 or 30 customers are all banks or insurance companies.
He suggests financial institutions first ensure compliance with the regulators, before moving their workloads to Azure.
"Our second biggest customer in South Africa is a bank in Simmonds Street and they do credit card fraud analytics in our Dublin data centre to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year."
Until Azure analytics offerings become available locally, most of these high value workloads will probably stay outside of the country, and "then it would make sense to me to bring them back", he says.
It's a little known fact that the Microsoft network is one of the three biggest networks in the world, adds Matheus. "Microsoft makes substantial investment in its own network, and because of that, moving information between different regions - from a Microsoft European region, to the South African region - as it is now, is free of charge.
"Microsoft even has its own submarine for laying cables."
All working together
What will the data centre of the future look like? Mattheus says the networks of the big data centre providers are peered.
"Perhaps what we'll see in the future is something like big Oracle database workloads running in the Oracle cloud, with maybe AI sitting in Google cloud platform, and maybe the front end sitting in Azure and all working together. That's something we're actively working towards understanding. I don't mind if you want to use another provider. I'm happy with that."
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