BongoHive in collaboration with Seven Seas Technologies is implementing the “Bongohive Cloud”. A project that will see local startups and tech savvy individuals at Bongohive host their apps and software without worrying about space and only concentrate on building apps. This will not only allow developers to get their applications up and running faster, but it will also expose them to new and futuristic ways of developing enterprise level applications. Cloud computing is a new delivery model for computing solutions via networking.

Being the only hub of its kind here in Zambia, BongoHive has a knack for new technologies and Cloud Computing is one among many of those.

The objectives of these installations are:

• Learning experience on how to implement a cloud solution As an African empowerment hub bongo hive seeks to enlighten members on how to build cloud and cloud solutions.
• As a platform for further leaning and development of enterprise solutions such as clustering. Business intelligence and big data.
• With a cloud solution creation of new virtual instances and also environment is easy. With that in mind creation of various labs environment would not only be possible but also quick.
• It will provide a platform to show case applications and solutions developed by the hub would normally require hardware investment and a lot of deployment time when using a cloud solution not only will it reduce the implementation time it will also can be easily be ported over the network to potential clients.

There are numerous cloud offerings in the market such infrastructure based eg VMware and application based such as Google Apps. We will be focusing on infrastructure as a service using Openstack.

Why Openstack? Open Stack differentiates itself from other cloud platforms with three unique properties.

It is a cloud in solution – This implies that Openstack was specifically built to provide a  cloud platform. Developers and designers had the end in mind for the current cloud solutions.

Vendor lock in – Openstack foundation is made up of vendors such as Cisco and dell; all which contribute to Openstack development. No single vendor has ownership of the product which is inherently transferred to end users who can choose the vendor to work with at any stage of deployment.

Open source – Openstack foundation has a community of over 133 companies and over 2000 active developers and users showing this is a mature game changing product. The costs of deployment are dramatically low since there no licensing costs while still maintaining a focused and thriving development.

The demand for cloud solutions is high and rising. This directly creates a demand for cloud providers and it’s integrators. With openstack we will be able to not only meet this demand and also solve two main problems that are associated with it’s realization these are vendor locking and setup costs.

Here are the features of what we hope to achieve

1. Compute capacity to support about 30 virtual machines within the first year.
2. Highly customizable network.
3. Access of the VMs to public
4. An end user-facing self-service portal. network isolation between development
5. A metering mechanism so to monitor resource consumption
6. Automated Mobile payment

If you would like to know more about the BongoHive Cloud, do keep an eye out for more blog posts.