AWS Services
The AWS Cape Town region was officially launched and is available from 22 April 2020.
There are three availability zones (af-south-1a, af-south-1b, af-south-1c) and we have created test workloads in Cape Town.
Key Considerations for running workloads in Cape Town:
AFRICA – This has created local jobs and will have a profoundly positive impact in our country and on our economy. Something to support and be immensely proud of.
CONNECTIVITY – takes away (mostly) the dependency on International SeaCom lines and provides National connectivity. Note that this is mostly the case, but some services do need international access.
LATENCY – There will undoubtedly be latency improvements in speed. We’ll need to measure these but we can expect some significant improvements.
SCOPE OF SERVICES – Not all services are available in Cape Town. Here is the list of available services.
COSTS – You can expect costs in the AWS region to be higher than other regions. This is simply due to the higher costs of hosting in this region. For example S3 costs in Ireland are $0.023/GB whilst in Cape Town it is $0.0274.
READINESS – At this stage, we would advise that it is used for non-production workloads whilst the central team perform some tests and monitoring of the environment.
SUPPORT – Much of the region information in terms of documentation and general descriptions are not yet in place.
Within the group, Autumn Leaf and Obsidian is an official AWS partner supporting the AWS Africa region. If anyone has any questions regarding the region, please feel free to contact our team.
Comprehensive SLA support & consulting services to drive your cloud journey (AWS & Azure) & augment and uplift your skills. Full security, CIS audit, monitoring, cost control & governance services.
CLOUD MANAGED SERVICES
Comprehensive SLA support & consulting services to drive your cloud journey
(AWS & Azure) & augment and
uplift your skills. Full security, CIS audit, monitoring, cost control & governance services.
BIG DATA
Build warehouse, IoT, batch & streaming into Data Lakes using Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL, Kafka, Redshift, Cloudera & EMR. Data flow and ETL with Glue,
Nifi, DataBrew, Talend.
DEVOPS
Full modern SDLC CI/CD Deployments (AWS Stack or Jenkins), CloudFormation and TerraForm Infrastructure as Code. Automation of tests and builds, source control, container and Kubernetes deployments.
MODERN APPLICATIONS
Modern elastic & resilient cloud native designed applications using modern patterns such as serverless, loosely coupled architectures. Microservices, React, GraphQL, Lambdas
completing the stack.
The cloud journey involves change – technically, operationally, culturally and structurally. Autumn Leaf can help transform teams and organisations to have a modern cloud-native, agile capability.
Proof of Concept
Quick Wins
Scattered Accounts
Little Structure
Cloud Strategy
People Model
CBO
Control Tower
Formalised Agreements
Major Migrations
Optimization Strategies
CCoE
Full Business Alignment
Mature Landing Zone CT
Cloud native designs
targeted for new levels of
business value.
New and better ways to run things.
Re-platform and re-architect.
PROJECT EXPLORATION
FOUNDATION ALIGNMENT
MIGRATION
IMPLEMENTATION
OPTIMIZATION SLA/CLA
Each service offering consists of 3 modules. Modules are designed to ensure rapid delivery, lower TCO & accelerated time to value.
AL SERVICES MODULES
Solution Accelerators
AL SWAT teams deploy tried and tested, hardened, best practice solution packages to reduce time to value
Consulting & Support Services
Experienced, certified subject matter experts available to drive and support efficient solution delivery
Training & Enablement
Rapidly uplift & energise teams with training & skills transfer that can be customised to fit requirements
Visibility is the key to determining the total cost of ownership. Depending on the business needs this can be spread over various lines of business or contained within a centralised department. As these costs won’t necessarily include the skills development and specialities required to perform the above tasks Autumn Leaf relieves the pressure on your resources.
Hidden costs can be difficult to determine all aspects of cloud including migration, automation, management, optimisation and a slew of tools that come with the complexity of a flexible and agile environment. Autumn Leaf provides the skills to architect, deploy and manage your cloud journey efficiently.
Fortunately, AWS does offer a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator and monthly cost calculator for a broad range of options. Ask us how.
As with all good business practices where utilisation costs are required a specific policy which is clear and simple to follow for the cloud can set the baseline for resource allocations and prevent any abuse in this area. However, it shouldn’t stop there, continuous monitoring of resources and optimisation of usage to ensure compliance is essential.
Cloud environments will continue to be a part of the IT landscape disrupting the traditional on-prem, especially around infrastructure, where most customers are experiencing maximum benefits.
As with all ‘shadow IT’ it will never be 100% eliminated, and sometimes one has to ask the question if the ability to try new and different tools or software would not aid in an organisation to be more forward-thinking and innovative? Why not allow for a percentage of spend available for ‘shadow IT’ and encourage a culture of curiosity? It would make it easier to audit and monitor this spend in your TCO for cloud services.
Autumn Leaf has over 100 cloud certifications with more than 70 employees.
Skills are spread across cloud, big data and open source technologies.
AWS MANAGED SERVICES
CloudWatch | CIS Benchmarks | Control Tower| CIS Security | Billing | CostOps | Monitoring/Reporting | Well-Architected Reviews | Cloud Adoption Framework
BIG DATA
Hadoop | EMR | HortonWorks | Spark | Presto | Graph | SageMaker | TensorFlowGlue | Hive | Redshift | Talend | Kafka | Kinesis | Deequ |
Nifi & Minifi | IOT | Cloudera
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DEVOPS
Python | CodePipeline | CodeBuild | CodeDeploy | Terraform | CloudFormation
MODERN APPLICATIONS
Python EKS | React | Amplify | NodeJS | DynamoDB | Docker | Lambda | IoT | Synthetic CloudWatch Monitoring | AppSync | Cognito
Cloud native teams built around shared responsibility & competencies are critical to a sustainable cloud environment
We can drive & augment teams with senior architects, specialists, juniors and internships.
QUALITY
Bridging programme qualified and prepares interns
VALUE
Apportion tasks to the appropriate skill level; technical debt is controlled
AGILITY
Agile cloud teams build competency & share delivery responsibility
STABILITY
Balanced workforce of lead, peer, junior and intern providing continuity to business
GROWTH
Opportunities for growth and movement within and amongst teams and projects
Best Practice Review of the existing environment. An AWS partner-led sponsored program.
Speak to us about a review and get $5k in AWS credits
WELL ARCHITECTED
Review AWS workloads against best practice
The AWS Well-Architected framework includes strategies to help you compare your workload against best practices, and obtain guidance to produce stable and efficient systems so you can focus on functional requirements
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COST OPTIMIZATION
Controlling waste, managing risk and controlling and analyzing spend
PERFORMANCE EFFICIENCY
Optimise & scale using IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. Automating, optimizing
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SECURITY
Securing the environment for
compliance to CIS benchmarks
RELIABILITY
Ensuring a design for failure approach
with HA, failover & DR in place
for RPO & RTO & SLA’s
SUSTAINABILITY
Supporting the environment & reducing the carbon footprint
OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
Ensuring operational procedures (support, maintenance, monitoring, skills) are effective
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