By Christopher Saul, Territory Sales Lead for East Africa at Red Hat
Cloud computing in Kenya is reaching new heights thanks to increasing and continued investments in infrastructure and skills. The country will soon be home to a data centre powered entirely by geothermal energy, and the government is prioritising the security of its records and data by providing cloud security skills training to more than 200 officials. These factors coalesce around a growing expectation that the cloud will play a critical role in daily state and business activities, as well as a lynchpin for socioeconomic growth and development.
While this is all promising, Kenya’s cloud journey would not be possible or sustainable without enterprises considering the other building blocks of modern cloud architectures. Every technology in an organisation’s IT stack needs to work together and for many, that begins with an operating system (OS) that enables a streamlined migration process to the cloud and serves as a stable, consistent, and secure platform for innovation.
What role does OS play today?
With enterprises building and running applications in the cloud, it can be easy to forget about the underlying OS. After all, in the old days, OS played a secondary role within the infrastructure and was just part of the framework. It was an efficient way to manage and interact with your hardware and subsystems. But as organisations move more and more workloads into public cloud environments, OS can serve as the unifying foundation across hybrid and multicloud infrastructure.
The keyword here is standardisation. By standardising on a single operating foundation across IT environments, Kenyan organisation can simplify their operations. Another key benefit for a market like Kenya where IT infrastructure and resources can still come at a premium is that OS manages CPU and memory use to maximise hardware performance, balancing workloads across resources and maintaining system responsiveness. This is a prerequisite especially when it comes to organisations running virtual machines (VMs) as it is the responsibility of the OS to optimise resource use, isolate workloads, and increase scalability across environments.
Welcome to the world of Linux
Originally conceived as a hobby by software engineer Linus Torvalds in the 1990s, Linux has grown and evolved to become the OS with the largest user base and the most-used OS on publicly available internet servers.
Linux’s key value offering is that it can serve as the basis for any IT initiative, ranging from cloud-native applications to containers and even security. Consistency then extends from the operating environment to the overall user and application environments. And while standardisation remains the keyword, not every environment has to be the same. It is by using the same common language and approach to building environments that gives the consistency and flexibility that Kenyan organisations need to build a new generation of applications and services.
That value offering extends to enterprise-grade, supported versions of Linux, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) where the OS deliver a stable administrative experience and lets businesses spend more time innovating and less time on repetitive, error-prone tasks. Furthermore, RHEL comes equipped with migration tools that enable businesses to move from other distributions, right up to deploying across multiple cloud environments.
Kickstarting the AI revolution
Where the importance of OS really comes into focus is how it enables enterprises to test the waters with artificial intelligence (AI) and leverage large language models (LLMs) as part of their applications. Kenya is already moving to harness the power of AI technology to address critical needs in sectors such as agriculture, education, and healthcare, and enterprises are following suit by building new AI-enabled applications on top of integrating the technology into existing ones.
RHEL AI is an example of how the OS can play a fundamental role in embracing AI. The programme is designed to streamline the development, testing, and deployment of generative AI (GenAI) models. The programme also allows for portability across hybrid cloud environments and the open source approach helps reduce costs and removes barriers to entry, all while promoting trust and transparency in GenAI model development and innovation. Importantly, the flexibility that RHEL AI offers means organisations do not need to overhaul their existing IT infrastructure when implementing their AI strategies.
Kenya’s AI revolution is tied directly to its cloud journey, and it’s with the help of OS that that revolution can take hold while remaining cost-effective. With the right programmes and an open approach, enterprises across all sectors can transform their infrastructure into a platform for change and innovation.