Focus Track
Cloud & Networking
From fibre and peering to edge and cloud: build fast, secure systems that work for South Africa.
Networks linked by undersea cables, terrestrial fibre, peering, and IXPs moving packets between providers.
IP addresses, DNS, BGP routing; latency shaped by path choices and distance.
HTTP/HTTPS over TLS for secure delivery; CDNs cache at the edge to reduce latency.
Load balancers spread traffic; autoscaling and caching keep apps responsive.
South African Reality
Africa connects via submarine cables and IXPs; peering reduces hops and latency.
Serve static assets and APIs closer to Cape Town/JHB to cut round trips.
Mix serverless, containers, and VMs; right-size for cost and performance.
TLS everywhere, WAFs, secrets management, network segmentation.
Replicate data, test restores, and respect residency where required.
Logs, metrics, traces, and synthetic tests for uptime and latency.
Tools & Practices
- • Docker for packaging; Kubernetes basics for orchestration.
- • Terraform/IaC for repeatable environments.
- • Cloud providers: AWS, Azure, GCP; CDN/edge via Cloudflare.
- • CI/CD: GitHub Actions; automated tests and linting before deploy.
- • Monitoring and logging: metrics, traces, uptime, error budgets.
- • Design for latency: cache, edge, and regional placement.