Zoho Says It Built Its Own Cloud From Scratch To Rival Google & AWS, Is Now Offering It Free To Students
Zoho co-founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu says the company chose to build its own cloud infrastructure rather than depend on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. In a post on X, he said the effort began early in Zoho's history, to run the company's own applications. Zoho built the core pieces itself, including databases, identity, messaging, search, storage and compute. Sridhar Vembu says…
Zoho co-founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu revealed the company's decision to construct its own cloud infrastructure instead of relying on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. This effort started early in Zoho's history when the company needed to run its own applications, and they built the core components including databases, identity, messaging, search, storage, and compute.
Vembu stated that Zoho skipped AWS and Google Cloud and is now opening this in-house infrastructure to outside developers through Catalyst, its serverless platform. Initially designed for extending Zoho's applications, Catalyst has since been adopted by developers outside the Zoho ecosystem. Zoho is making Catalyst free for students, aiming to allow them to build and deploy real applications without infrastructure concerns.
The company maintains that all Zoho products are developed in India with its global headquarters in Chennai, and customer data is stored in India. Zoho operates over 18 data centers worldwide, hosting data per country and region. Despite the availability of large cloud firms' services for regional switching, Zoho's data remains in-house.
Vembu cautioned against blindly relying on AI-generated code, urging developers to maintain understanding of the systems they build.
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