Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of India’s largest providers of cloud-based services, has offered start-up credits that let aspiring entrepreneurs access a range of services, including hosting, computation, and storage, for free.
According to Kumara Raghavan, Head, Startups at AWS India, AWS has assisted startups by “compressing” their lifespan, which has increased their capacity for innovation. “Cloud services” refers to the ability to run tests, mimic trials, fail, and learn from mistakes.
“If you are a college student, you get credits worth $1,000 (about ₹82,600) and can straightaway get started on your idea, and as you expand you get credits worth $5,000 (over ₹4 lakh) or $10,000 (₹8.26 lakh) all the way till $100,000 (₹82 lakh). Since 2020, we have given, across the world, credits worth $2 billion (more than ₹16,500 crore). And I don’t have exact numbers, but a significant proportion of them are in India. Once some of these companies matured, there were different levels of support offered,” said Raghavan.
The number of registered startups in India has increased over the past five years from 452 in 2016 to 84,012, according to data provided in Parliament. Many of them are based in the cloud—the servers and data storage that are accessible via the internet—and data-storage companies are providing a variety of incentives to entice and keep them on their platforms. They are found in a variety of industries, including financial tech, gaming, and health tech.
One of the major markets for such cloud services is India, which boasts the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world. Arogya.ai, a genomics company, relied on the AWS system to store data from blood samples in locations without reliable internet access. Fittr, which helps track body vitals and meet fitness goals, Credit Vidya, which enables workers who have never used a bank account to “digitize” their salaries, and HealthifyME were some of the companies supported by AWS. In addition, AWS ran the Cowin system for COVID-19 vaccinations and the Ayushman Bharat Digital project, according to Mr. Raghavan.
While Bengaluru remains the country’s startup capital, AWS is increasingly connecting to startups in locations outside of Delhi’s and Mumbai’s major metropolitan areas. AWS was running a number of programs to teach cloud computing skills to those who had little to no education.
The organization has trained roughly three million people nationwide thus far through nearly 500 free courses and 11 certificates. According to Mr. Raghavan, the company collaborated with 28 educational institutions to integrate AWS into their course curricula.
Betting on the rising demand for cloud services, AWS launched its second data-cluster area in Hyderabad, requiring an expenditure of $4.4 billion (about 36,300 crore) by 2030. Because of the new infrastructure and related services, 48,000 jobs would become accessible in a range of fields. Mumbai was home to the very first such region.
“How we design such infrastructure is to locate them in different seismic zones. Every region has three ‘availability zones’. This is so that if ever there are natural calamities, there’s always backup storage available. However, the centers are also designed in such a way that they aren’t too far and there is minimal latency (or lag) such that users spread across the country can access their applications seamlessly. The exact locations of these zones aren’t publicly disclosed,” said Mr. Raghavan.
