Hi guys!.
I’ll get straight to the point. I’m a Linux Admin working on expanding my skill set into DevOps and cloud, but want to ensure that I’m going in the same direction as the Nigerian tech industry.
I’m considering learning tools like Puppet and Chef and Public cloud stuff with AWS. I know these are hot areas for admins in the western world, but have no idea if the IT industry in Nigeria has started implementing these technologies in their infrastructure. (P.S I know AWS is widely used)
So, my question is, for those of you currently working in IT departments for companies in Nigeria (of any size), are these relevant skills to have if one wants to work as a Linux System Administrator in Nigeria?
Any advise would be appreciated.
This is a question for @ChukaOfili
Hey @muyiscoi,
So it depends on what kind of company and IT role. Older enterprise companies in nigeria still use the more legacy stack (i.e. On-premise deployments with windows & linux (enterprise versions)) while newer and more progressive companies including startups & small to medium size businesses rely on cloud infrastructure because it is more affordable to get going from the ground up. So tools like Puppet, Chef, Docker, CoreOS etc can help for the latter scenario especially with platforms like AWS, Google Cloud/App Engine or managing your own stack with built on services like DigitalOcean, RackSpace & the likes.
You probably would find more opportunities in the latter, as those roles seem to be more sort after these days.
I hope i have been able to shed some light.
cc @lordbanks
That’s very helpful. Thanks @lordbanks @ChukaOfili. Guess I’ll keep doing what I’m doing then 
I second this. However I’ll like to add that there is an increasing preference for turnkey projects that run within their own private clouds. We build Openstack-based private clouds and deploy micro-services in Docker containers, and suffice to say, clients love it.
Our devops stack includes:
- Private Cloud O/S: Openstack. Full works i.e. Nova, Swift, Neutron, Cinder, Designate, etc
- VM O/S: Ubuntu 14.04+
- Container: Docker
- SCM: Gitlab
- Config management: Consul
@muyiscoi - if you are an experienced Linux sys admin, let’s connect.
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That’s nice to hear!. Didn’t think there would be a market for private cloud in naija. Guess I’ve underestimated our IT landscape. I used Openstack (via RDO) a bit earlier this year and want to get more into that as well.
@techscorpion Yes we should. You can message me on here.
Frankly, I was going to do a post about our 2-year experience with Openstack, and the tonnes of money we’ve saved by switching out from AWS, without sacrificing elastic compute, elastic load balancing, orchestration, network function virtualization, and all the other goodies.
The enterprises we work with were driven by the need for simplicity. They can provide the hardware, power, storage but the vendor provides everything else. AWS is a non-starter because many of them require on-prem deployments. AWS is also a non-starter from a cost perspective. I know a company that runs 50+ VMs on five 64-GB quad core nodes using Openstack. Their setup on AWS will knock you back $5000+ per month but they’ve got it running for roughly $400 per month. That’s approx 90% saving. In this economy, that’s like music to the CIO/CFO’s ears.
In summary, Linux skills are a gold mine in Nigeria, and coupled with strong devops skills, you can literally be worth your weight in gold.
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Baba if i had seen this your example i wnt hv switched to AWS, Crying…but anyway i give it a 6 month headway, will begin looking at openstack.
No shaking.
If you or anybody has any questions re setting up Openstack, I’ll be more than happy to share my experiences and hopefully save you a lot of initial frustration.
In addition, if you need to get a bunch of high speed, high memory commodity dedicated boxes to practice building a private cloud on, head over to Hetzner. They provide the best price - performance ratio that I know of.
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Thanks, will get my Dev guys on this.
Hi @techscorpion can you provide more information on OpenStack alternatives, if any, to S3 and plug-and-play components like is currently being used on EMR. At the moment, really happy with the easy spin up and use of S3 and Hadoop/Spark on Linux(EMR). Is there something similar on OpenStack that you can point me to? I’d love to discuss this with you if you are able to
Sure. Let’s start with a roundup.
- Compute - AWS has EC2 whilst Openstack has Nova
- Networking - AWS does not have a named service but the equivalent in Openstack is called Neutron
- Telemetry / Monitoring - AWS has CloudWatch whilst Openstack has Ceilometer
- Security - Both platforms use security groups and SSH keypairs
- Identity Management - AWS has IAM whilst Openstack has Keystone
- Storage for objects - AWS has S3 whilst Openstack has Swift
- Storage for blocks - AWS has EBS whilst Openstack has Cinder
- Database - AWS has RDS whilst Openstack has Trove (with handlers for MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, etc)
- Orchestration - AWS has CloudFormation whilst Openstack has Heat
- Big Data - AWS has EMR whilst Openstack has Sahara
There’s more information here - http://redhatstackblog.redhat.com/2015/05/13/public-vs-private-amazon-compared-to-openstack/
With regard to running Map-Reduce clusters, I know you can setup Hadoop and Spark clusters very easily with Sahara. I tested it about two years ago but we didn’t use it in production because Sahara was still new then. It’s a lot more stable now.
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Thanks @techscorpion for the information…really helpful. I’ll definitely be reaching out to you really soon to assist with some devops challenges we’re having. Can you please PM me your details. Thanks again for the info
It’s very important. The power situation in Nigeria means no one is going to be rolling out server farms here any time soon. Openstack, AWS, Digital Ocean etc are essential. Provisioning and Deployment tools are very useful. that being said they’d rather just have a dev do it. hiring a separate person to do server / deployment management is expensive. unless you are very large you probably don’t need some unix greybeard.
But don’t you have to provide power and auxiliaries for Openstack clusters too?
There are lots of server farms in Nigeria. Practically all the telcos and financial institutions (banks, PFAs, insurance companies, etc) have setup large climate-controlled environments with rows of rack-mounted servers, all powered 24/7 with backup UPS systems. In addition, MainOne and Galaxy Backbone both provide Tier 3 datacenter spaces to their public and private sector clients.
As far as I know, virtualization in commonly done through VMware and provisioning new VMs and VLANs can be a long, bureaucratic process. Cue Openstack, which is frees you from VMware and helps you setup a private cloud with similar features to AWS and Digital Ocean, but it is still orthogonal to those public cloud platforms.
Yes, you do.
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So, how do companies typically deploy their cloud environment in this kind of environment? Do they just rent rack space in the data centre and have them setup hardware with network access that they can to do whatever they want with?
Within Nigeria, I’ve only ever seen private clouds deployed in self-owned server farms.
However, nothing precludes deploying it in an external datacenter as long as it’s deployed on bare-metal machines and not VMs. You really don’t want to deploy a private cloud in a network of VMs because you’ll essentially be virtualizing twice and it’ll kill your IO performance. The DC may try to sell you a VM but you’ve got to insist on bare-metal. If they can’t provide it, then you can simply just ask to bring in your own cabinet; servers and switch(es) included.