Make in India!
From IEEE Spectrum, October 28:
It’s an alternative to options from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft
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 nonprofit 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. It also plans to 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...
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