Cloud Computing: India Group Challenges Amazon and Google

By Pune Media On Oct 28, 2024 15

Cloud computing underpins much of our digital lives, but it’s dominated by a handful of companies. A group of Indian technologists wants to change that by creating an open market for cloud providers of all sizes. The technology got its first demonstration last week at a hackathon in Bengaluru.

Rapid digitization of the economy and the AI boom are converging to create unprecedented demand for computing capacity. But Amazon, Google, and Microsoft account for 67 precent of the global cloud market, leaving customers with little choice or bargaining power. The proprietary tools and systems these companies provide can also make it a headache to switch from one to another, and in developing countries their services are also often too expensive for many potential users.

The Indian non-profit People+ai wants to fix this by creating an open and interoperable marketplace of cloud providers of all sizes. The Open Cloud Compute (OCC) project plans to use open protocols and standards to allow cloud providers of all sizes to offer their services on the network, and make it easy for customers to shift between offerings depending on their needs. People+ai held a hackathon on 20 September at People’s Education Society University (PES University) in Bengaluru to test out an early prototype of the platform.

“The way the market is currently structured, compute is there but it’s really in the hands of a few global cloud service providers,” says Tanvi Lall, the director of strategy at People+ai. “The question we asked was, if you have some smaller players who could make the market more competitive, how do you augment their work? That’s how OCC was born.”

Big Cloud Companies Aren’t Always the Best Fit

Lall is quick to point out that the big cloud companies provide a great service for big enterprises or companies looking to scale quickly. But for startups, smaller businesses, or students, their offerings are not always a good fit, and, in India, often too expensive. There are also industries like healthcare or finance in which companies are keen to keep their data close to home for security reasons and because the Indian government has signaled it may pass data localization rules.

In the AI space, Lall says, there are many applications where latency is an issue, such as analyzing security camera footage, making it preferable to use nearby compute resources. And there are many smaller Indian businesses that have more modest needs for things like database storage or web hosting, where local providers could provide more cost-effective services.

The OCC project is largely run by volunteers at present and is still in the early stages, says Lall. But it has already signed up several local data center providers and built an interface to aggregate their offerings. The platform allows users to search for computing resource that fit their requirements and then links them to the services of their chosen provider.

The recent hackathon was the first trial run of the interface. Teams of undergraduate students at PES University working on AI projects were invited to use the platform to access cloud offerings from two local providers—Vigyanlabs and Jarvislabs.

One student team used the opportunity to build out their idea for an AI system that could analyze diagrams of cloud infrastructure architectures and then set up the required resources. They connected with Jarvislabs via the OCC interface to fine tune an open-source coding model that helps users easily configure the smaller details of their cloud infrastructure, which aren’t always clear from the diagrams. This would not have been possible on the free but unreliable services like Google Collab that students normally use, says team-member Varun C, an undergraduate student at PES University.

Open-Source Clouds Could Lessen Costs and Headaches

While the computing time was provided for free during the hackathon, the lower costs of Indian providers available on the OCC platform could also make a big difference to students. The team had spent US $5 to simply set up the barebones of the project on AWS, but after six hours on Jarvislab’s platform their bill was still less than 100 rupees (about US $1.19). Having access to high-quality computing resources at reasonable prices can allow students to be more ambitious with the kind of projects they attempt, says team-member Vikas Menezes, also an undergraduate student at PES University. “We can think bigger.”

Cost is also likely to be the biggest motivators for businesses to use the platform as well, says Manodyna K H, co-founder of Begaluru-based AI start-up Ovii, who had volunteered to act as a mentor at the hackathon. Unless there is the potential for significant savings, companies will likely be reluctant to go through the hassle of switching their cloud providers. “We use provider-specific tools and that will cause you to have a vendor lock-in,” she says. “Migrating means changing significant parts of your codebase, so that is a barrier for most of us.”

The next stage of the project will be to ease these challenges, says Prasanna Kakhandaki, director of AI products at Hewlett-Packard, who is volunteering to help build the OCC network. The plan is to use open-source protocols and standards to make services available on the platform interoperable, with the ultimate goal of making it seamless for users to switch providers or even share their workload across multiple vendors.

“We are looking to have the workload move between the providers, or even scale out of one provider to another provider, while still maintaining the same level of experience,” Kakhandaki says.

How exactly this will be achieved is yet to be finalized, says Kakhandaki. It will require providers to adopt shared standards for how they configure their systems and develop tools used on their platforms, to ensure that customer’s applications can seamlessly switch between clouds.

Initiatives like the Open Application Model, Open Service Broker and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation provide various tools and frameworks that could help in this regard. But getting providers to adopt them is likely to be a harder sell, Kakhandaki admits, as it will require them to redesign their systems.

But Lall hopes that by conducting more pilots with different user groups, the OCC will be able to demonstrate the value in adopting a more open approach to cloud computing. “We want to showcase that it helps a provider sell more or utilize their hardware more,” she says. “And at the same time it gives the customer confidence that maybe for these particular workloads these providers will make sense for you.”

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