AwkData

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Inspiration and Motivation

It was a random morning in late November 2023 when I tried applying for international scholarships and exchange programs. Many of them required a detailed university certificate. So I contacted my university’s student affairs office. What I received in return felt like a joke.

They told me they had no access to my certificate because it was stored on a random server on-premises, inaccessible due to the war. I was stunned. My future hinged on a machine that could burn down or be lost in crossfire. It wasn’t just about data loss anymore. It was about losing the very services that powered our institutions. Getting something as fundamental as a passport or national ID had become a nightmare.

Sudanese businesses didn’t fare better. Many rely on foreign cloud services, but even the big players like AWS, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner. WHich had their own set of problems such as:

Service Bans: Sudanese users frequently face account bans due to U.S. sanctions.
Payment Restrictions: We are yet to get our hands on a credit card.
Latency: with datacenters being in Europe and the U.S. It introduces long response times.
Usability: Overcomplicated dashboards and technical language alienate users.

To validate these problems, I surveyed over 150 Sudanese students, engineers, tech workers, and founders:

83% had used major cloud providers.
75% encountered payment or latency issues.
50% reported poor usability and/or account suspensions.

That’s when I realized: Sudan needs its own cloud infrastructure. A localized, sovereign alternative that understands our constraints and builds for them.

What does it do

AwkData is a Sudanese-facing cloud platform offering:

Virtual Machines and Containers for compute workloads.
Block and Object Storage for persistent data needs.
Managed Services like databases, secrets, Kubernetes, and DNS.
An AI agent that provisions resources based on natural-language prompts.
Multi-language user interface (Arabic and English).
Local payment support including mobile banking and USSD.
A dashboard and API, with CLI support coming soon.

Whether you're building a personal site, launching a startup, running enterprise workloads, even deploying government services, or ironically, running a hackathon named code for sudan that has tech projects hosted on so many random places :) AwkData provides the infrastructure to do it, securely and locally.

How is it built

Tech Stack

Frontend: React.
Backend: Django.
Database: PostgreSQL.
Cache: Redis.
Task Queue: Celery.
Reverse proxy: Nginx.
Cloud Infrastructure: OpenStack.

Proudly built using 100% FOSS stack

Features and Functionality

The current PoC offers a minimum cloud experience:

Compute

Provision Linux or Windows virtual machines.
Full customization: CPU, RAM, disk.
On-the-fly firewall rules (security groups).
Virtual networks, floating IPs, and subnets.

Storage

Block Storage: attachable volumes for VMs
Object Storage: scalable, S3-compatible storage for apps, media, and backups.

Networking

Cloud-native networking: routers, subnets, private and external gateways.

AI Agent (in progress)

AwkData’s AI agent translates user requests into infrastructure blueprints. For example:

"I want to build a photography portfolio website."

The agent responds with an actionable plan:

Provision an Ubuntu VM.
Install Hugo (static site generator).
Allocate object storage for image hosting.
Suggest a 1-core, 2GB instance.
Set up firewall rules for HTTP/HTTPS traffic.

The AI uses OpenStack APIs, backend scripts, and MCP servers to reason and generate deployable infrastructure plans. It’s currently semi-automated, with a roadmap toward full orchestration.

Developer Experience

Fully functional dashboard
REST API with authentication
CLI tooling in development

Challenges and Lessons Learned

Technical Challenges

Designing for ultra-low latency while operating in a bandwidth-limited environment.
Achieving resilience and modularity within budget and time constraints.
Balancing rapid development with long-term infrastructure scalability.
Working with AI agents highlighted the limits of “vibe coding”—useful for simple scaffolding but error-prone for critical systems.
Realizing how tiny misconfigurations in infrastructure lead to cascading failures.

Real-World Obstacles

I built AwkData under extreme conditions. Based in Khartoum, I dealt with constant blackouts caused by the war. At one point, I had to charge my laptop at a hospital just to keep going. Every line of code is written against the odds.

What’s Next

The next phase of AwkData includes:

Full-stack Kubernetes provisioning.
Usage-based billing and credit system.
CLI tool for DevOps automation.
Securing VC Fundraising to transition from prototype to production-grade service.
Launching with a minimal equipment in a colocation host (Sudani).

AwkData isn’t just a technical solution. It’s a vision for national digital sovereignty. It represents a refusal to be left behind and a commitment to building foundational infrastructure for the future.

Sudan doesn’t need to wait for access. We can build our own.