AinaCloud project, Madagascar
The modular sovereign cloud
A sovereign, modular IaaS infrastructure with low upfront investment, designed for Madagascar and Africa.
Let's build Madagascar's sovereign cloud infrastructure together.
The problem
Traditional datacenters run into four barriers in the Malagasy context.
Heavy walls
Civil works, shielding, physical security: a traditional datacenter ties up huge capital, with a five-to-ten-year payback.
Power constraints
A large hall of several hundred kilowatts overloads local transformers and burns the diesel budget at every power cut.
Licences paid in foreign currency
Proprietary platforms impose a rent in dollars or euros that weighs on local operators' margins.
Costly hardware imports
Imported equipment carries high customs duties. Every server must be justified by real demand, not installed "just in case".
The AinaCloud answer: frugal, modular IaaS
- A 20-foot micro-shelter: an equipped shipping container with a small footprint, placed on a local host’s site that provides space, power and network.
- Industrial open source: OpenStack and Ceph, with no software licences and full, autonomous control of the technical stack.
- Pay as you grow: the container fills up as demand grows (vertical growth), then a new module is added once the first is full (horizontal growth).
- Local billing: virtual machines payable in ariary or via mobile money, with latency under 10 ms.
- Certified refurbished hardware: professional-grade servers and switches for a controlled initial investment.
Module specifications
| Component | Choice |
|---|---|
| Enclosure | ISO 20 ft High Cube container, C5M anti-corrosion insulation, IP55 to IP65, RFID badge access |
| Capacity | 6 to 8 42U racks, hot/cold aisle containment, target PUE below 1.3 |
| Power | 15 to 30 kW IT continuous, modular switchboard with grid/generator transfer switch, N+1 UPS |
| Cooling | InRow N+1 precision air conditioning, direct expansion |
| Safety | Automatic clean-agent fire suppression with early smoke detection, remote DCIM monitoring |
| Software | OpenStack for compute and networking, Ceph on JBOD with 4+2 erasure coding |
| Resilience | Raised shelter in flood-prone areas, backup power from the host site’s generator |
The offer
- Standard VM: 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB storage, guaranteed resources.
- Additional services (roadmap): backup, replication, VPN as a Service, interconnection with public clouds, then higher-value PaaS services.
- Location: phase 1 on a secure industrial host site in Antananarivo; phase 2 close to the national Internet exchange point, with direct connectivity to every operator.
A local partnership model
AinaCloud brings the engineering: architecture, OpenStack, Ceph and service-level commitment. The local partner brings the anchoring: secure site, power, network, on-site support and market access.
A · Dedicated client
The infrastructure serves only the partner's internal needs. AinaCloud designs, deploys and manages it.
B · Co-operator
The partner hosts the shelter, uses its VMs and resells remaining capacity to its client network, with revenue sharing.
C · Hosting
AinaCloud owns the infrastructure and pays the host for the space and secured power.
From contract to first customer in 19 weeks
- W1 – W4Host site negotiation, network and power scoping
- W5 – W12Ordering, preparation and qualification of hardware
- W13 – W18Physical installation, OpenStack and Ceph deployment
- W19 +Load testing, commercial launch, VM migration
The founder
AinaCloud is led by Hajasolo Joël Andrianoelison, founder of MATL IT Consulting: engineer from ESPA Antananarivo and École Centrale de Marseille, 25 years in systems and cloud architecture, author of « Le Cloud Privé avec OpenStack » (ENI) and architect of a sovereign modular datacenter in France. The AinaCloud idea was born in 2020, designed from the start for Madagascar and Africa.
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