Cloud infrastructure and web hosting providers

The cloud as a service, renting computing power instead of buying servers

Every app on your phone has a backend. It stores the data, handles the logins and runs the app's business logic. The backend runs on servers in a data centre. (More on the building in Market Segment 3.1, Data centre and colocation providers, in Industry Vertical 3, Data centres and servers.)

Take a five-person start-up in Pune building a food-ordering app. Its backend needs servers. But the team does not want to buy servers, or rent space in a data centre to keep them in. So it rents computing power instead:

A virtual server

paid for by the hour. It is a slice of a real server that behaves like a computer of its own.

Storage

paid for by the amount of data it holds.

A managed database

which the provider installs, updates and backs up for the team.

This is what "the cloud" means. The provider owns the servers and keeps them running. The customer rents a share of them over the internet, and pays for what it uses.

Market Segment 3.1 was about the building. This Market Segment is about the other half: the software through which a provider rents out its machines. It also covers other things a company rents, such as its domain name and a place for its website.

The three biggest cloud providers are called hyperscalers. They are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and together they hold most of this market. They are covered elsewhere. (More on them in Amazon, Microsoft and Google, in the big-tech collection.) This Market Segment is about everyone else.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

The Pune start-up rents its server, its storage and its database from a developer cloud, its name, padlock and hosting from a registrar or web host, and a place near its users from an edge network, while governments and telecom operators buy the software to run a cloud of their own.

This Market Segment has four sub-segments:

The cloud for everyone else: cloud providers for developers, start-ups and mid-sized companies

The software that runs a cloud: software for organisations that want a cloud of their own

Domains, DNS and web hosting: the website's name, its padlock and a place to keep it

The edge as a cloud: networks built to deliver and protect websites, which now also run code

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The cloud for everyone else
The software that runs a cloud
Domains, DNS and web hosting
The edge as a cloud

The cloud for everyone else

Developer clouds, and servers and storage rented by use (infrastructure as a service)

Take the Pune start-up from the start of this Market Segment. It could rent from AWS. But the hyperscalers built for the largest customers first. Smaller customers became a market of their own. They are individual developers, start-ups, and mid-sized companies that want a server and a bill that is easy to understand.

DigitalOcean

is the best-known name in this market. It started with the simple virtual server. It has since added managed databases. (More on databases sold as a service in Market Segment 7.1, Databases and data warehouses, in Industry Vertical 7, Database and storage companies.) It has also added Kubernetes, open-source software that runs an app's containers across many servers. A container is a package of code with everything it needs to run. (More on Kubernetes in Market Segment 5.2, Enterprise Linux and private cloud platforms.) After buying Paperspace, DigitalOcean also rents out servers with GPUs for AI work. GPUs are the graphics chips that train and run AI models. DigitalOcean hires in Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

One company here works the other way round. Instead of renting out machines in its own data centres, it puts them where the customer is.

Zadara

sells cloud-style computing and storage as a service. The machines sit inside the customer's own building or a partner's data centre. The customer still pays for what it uses, as it would in the cloud. Zadara hires in Bengaluru.

The software that runs a cloud

Sovereign and edge cloud platforms, software to run GPU clouds, cloud operations

The Pune start-up is happy to rent its servers. Not every organisation is. More and more governments, telecom operators and regulated industries, such as banking, want a cloud that stays inside the country and under their own control. This is called a sovereign cloud. A new kind of company sells these organisations the software to run one.

Some of that computing also has to happen at the edge. The edge means small sites close to the users or machines that need the computing, such as a telecom tower or a factory. It is the opposite of one large data centre far away.

Coredge.io

is a Noida company, now owned by Sirius Digitech, a joint venture of the Adani Group. It sells a platform for running a sovereign cloud. The same platform decides where each app runs, including out at the edge, and manages it there. Coredge.io hires in Bengaluru and Delhi.

hosted·ai

is a California company with an office in Bengaluru. It does the same for the newest kind of cloud, the GPU cloud. Its software turns a room full of GPUs into a cloud that a provider can sell. It lets many customers share the same GPUs, decides whose job runs on which GPU, and measures each customer's use for the bill. The industry calls these multi-tenancy, scheduling and metering. hosted·ai sums up its product as "a neocloud in a box". A neocloud is a new cloud provider that rents out GPUs for AI. (It also appears in Market Segment 9.2, MLOps and LLMOps platforms, in Industry Vertical 9, AI labs and model platforms.)

Software such as hosted·ai turns a room full of GPUs into a cloud a provider can sell: it lets many customers share the GPUs, decides whose job runs on which GPU, and measures each customer's use for the bill.

One company here works on the customer's side instead. It does not help anyone run a cloud. It helps a company look after the cloud it already rents.

MontyCloud

is a company from Redmond, in the United States, with engineers in Bengaluru. After a few years on AWS, a company may have hundreds of servers, databases and settings across many accounts. MontyCloud sells a platform that runs all of this for it. It automates the routine operations, keeps the costs under control, and checks that the setup follows the rules the company must meet. That last job is called compliance.

The cloud you can own.

Two things are pushing the same way. Governments want their data kept inside the country. And GPUs have been scarce, so whoever owns a room full of them can sell GPU time. Both push telecom operators, governments and data-centre owners to run a cloud of their own, instead of renting one. To do that, they need software. Coredge.io and hosted·ai, two of the youngest companies here, are built for exactly that.

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Domains, DNS and web hosting

Registering domain names, the Domain Name System (DNS), SSL certificates, shared and managed web hosting

Back to the Pune start-up. Before customers can find the app's website, the team needs four things:

A domain name

such as the start-up's own .in address. A company called a registrar sells the name and records who owns it. The owner pays a fee every year to keep it.

DNS

the Domain Name System. It turns that name into the numeric IP address of the server where the website lives.

An SSL certificate

It proves that the website really belongs to the start-up, and lets the browser encrypt everything sent to it. The browser shows it as the padlock next to the web address. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. (More on certificates in Market Segment 4.2, Identity and access management (IAM), in Industry Vertical 4, Cybersecurity.)

Web hosting

a place on a server to keep the website. With shared hosting, many small websites sit on one server and split its cost. With managed hosting, the host also looks after updates, backups and security.

This is the oldest business in this Market Segment. It is usually the first thing a small company pays for, and the same companies often sell all four together.

Three of the companies here belong to one group, Newfold Digital:

Newfold Digital

was formed in 2021, when Endurance International and Web.com merged. It owns many brands. Its Indian company, in Mumbai, owns BigRock and ResellerClub. Endurance bought these two brands from Directi in 2014.

Bluehost

is one of Newfold's brands.

Network Solutions

is another Newfold brand. It was the original registrar of the commercial internet. It sells domains, certificates and hosting.

Two more companies here are not part of Newfold:

GoDaddy

is the best-known registrar. It hires in Delhi and Pune.

hosting.com

is a web host. It hires in Bengaluru.

The edge as a cloud

Content-delivery networks (CDNs) that now also rent out computing

Back to the Pune start-up once more. Its app is now popular, with users from Guwahati to Kochi. They all reach the same server, which is far away from many of them. So the team puts a content-delivery network (CDN) in front of its website.

A CDN is a network of servers placed in many cities, close to the users. It keeps copies of a website's pages and images, so each user gets them from a nearby server. Every visit to the website passes through the CDN. That makes it a good place to block attacks too.

With a CDN in front of the website, a user in Guwahati or Kochi reaches a nearby server that answers from its copy, blocks attacks and can run part of the app, and only goes back to the far-away virtual server when it has to.

Two companies grew from this idea into security, and then into clouds of their own. Both are covered mainly in another Market Segment. (More on both in Market Segment 4.5, Network security, firewalls and SASE, in Industry Vertical 4, Cybersecurity.)

Akamai Technologies

built the original content-delivery network. It first turned that into a security business. Then, in 2022, it bought Linode and became a cloud provider too. The same servers now rent out computing and storage. Akamai's Bengaluru centre is one of its largest engineering sites anywhere.

Cloudflare

took the same path, but started from the security side. It began as a firewall in front of the website. It has grown into a network on which developers run code, store files and host whole applications, without renting a server at all. Its engineers in India are in Bengaluru.

For the Pune team, this means part of its app's code can run on the CDN's servers, close to each user. The network built to deliver and protect websites has become a place to run them.

That is the software half of the cloud. The Pune start-up rents its server, its database, its name and its padlock, and runs part of its app on a delivery network. Governments and telecom operators that want a cloud of their own buy the software to run it.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What cloud providers and OS makers hire for.

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