Sridhar Vembu: Zoho Built Its Own Cloud, Now Free for Students

Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu explains that the company decided to build its own cloud infrastructure instead of turning to services from major providers like AWS and Google Cloud. Zoho is making this infrastructure available to developers through Catalyst-its serverless platform-and plans to offer it to students for free.

Vembu noted that Zoho began developing its own infrastructure in the company's early days to run its applications. This encompasses several fundamental systems required to operate cloud software, such as databases, identity management, messaging, search, storage, and computing.

"One of the first things we did at Zoho was build our own cloud infrastructure to run our applications," Vembu stated in a recent post.

A look at Vembu's statements regarding AWS, Google Cloud, and the free cloud infrastructure Zoho offers to students.

He pointed out that Zoho developed these systems in-house rather than relying on AWS or Google Cloud. Since then, the company has opened this infrastructure to developers through Catalyst. Catalyst was originally created to allow developers to extend Zoho applications. According to Vembu, the platform is now also being used by developers outside the Zoho ecosystem.

Zoho wants students to develop without infrastructure costs

Zoho is increasing its investment in Catalyst and will offer the platform to students for free. The company aims to enable them to build and deploy applications without worrying about infrastructure costs while working on their projects. "Our goal is to provide developers with the infrastructure needed to turn their ideas into real products," stated Vembu.

This initiative also aligns with Vembu's previous comments regarding how Zoho develops and operates its products. In a post from September 2025, he addressed questions about where the company's software is developed, where customer data is stored, and which companies provide the infrastructure underpinning Zoho's services.

Vembu noted that all Zoho products are developed in India and that the company's headquarters is located in Chennai. Zoho has offices in more than 80 countries, including a significant presence in the United States.

He also noted that data from Indian customers is hosted in India-with data centres in Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai at the time of publication, and another planned for Odisha-and that Zoho operates more than 18 data centres worldwide, storing information according to the respective country or region.

"All our services run on hardware we own and software frameworks we developed ourselves, built upon open-source technologies like the Linux operating system and the Postgres database," Vembu stated.

He also indicated that Zoho does not host its products on AWS or Azure. While services from major cloud providers might be used for regional switching nodes-helping to improve traffic speed-Vembu clarified that data is not stored on those services. Zoho is also expanding its footprint by adding more access points in various locations.

Vembu warns developers against ceding control to AI

Recently, Vembu addressed another challenge facing software developers: the growing use of AI tools to write code.

Responding to a developer who described a workflow where specifications, code, tests, and other engineering tasks were generated using Claude Code, Vembu asserted that companies should not allow AI to replace the understanding engineers have of their own software.

"It’s unfortunate. I tell our engineers to use AI, but never to surrender our capacity for understanding to it," he declared.

Vembu noted that the software industry is moving too fast with AI, comparing the situation to "driving a sophisticated new car at high speed that we barely know how to handle." He warned that this could lead to problems if developers stop understanding the systems they are building.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kahekashan

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Kahekashan is a passionate technophile with a keen eye for cutting-edge gadgets, emerging technologies, and everything in the digital realm. Raised in a Defence family with strong values and a background in literature, she has consistently pursued excellence in every endeavour. Her last full-time assignment involved content writing with the Indian School of Business.

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