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Why India, why the cloud, and why Artificial Intelligence? These are key questions that were asked and answered at Ola Krutrim’s workshop at YourStory’s tech summit, DevSparks. The one-hour workshop – the first of two – was a part of the activities lined up by Ola Krutrim at DevSparks 2024. After an electrifying fireside chat between Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-founder and CEO of Ola and Shraddha Sharma, Founder and CEO, Yourstory, senior leaders at Ola Krutrim announced the launch of new products and announced breakthroughs in the Indian AI landscape. The workshops then continued the deep dive into Indian AI, Ola Krutrim Cloud Stack and next-gen solutions built by Indian developers.

The first workshop, titled “Next-gen innovation for AI-cloud integration”, was hosted by Vipul Shah, VP of Product at Krutrim and Dinesh Mittal, Senior Director, Krutrim. The workshop featured talks by Shah, demos by Mittal and a round of Q&A with the audience. Let’s look at some of the highlights of the session.

Boosting India’s cloud ecosystem

Shah opened the session with a simple question: Why is the Indian cloud so important? Today, cloud penetration in India lags behind China and the US for multiple reasons. The first being the community. The cloud, Shah says, is not just a tool or a product to consume, it is an ecosystem. The more people use it, the more use cases are discovered and more solutions are developed.

Furthermore, he spoke about the distinction between the cloud community and ecosystem. The community consists entirely of developers. The ecosystem, on the other hand, will include startups, enterprises, tech enthusiasts and other businesses that are developing innovative solutions that can be offered on the cloud.

Complexity is another problem that the Indian developer community must fix. In order to scale and truly boost the cloud ecosystem in India, developers need to think simple. Finally, there needs to be a market fit for the cloud.

“You can develop the cloud, you can develop cool things. But the point is, it needs to meet the use cases. And believe it or not, the use cases are increasing exponentially. So how do you develop things that are not just cool from a technical standpoint, but really fit the market needs?” Shah said.

Without these factors, cloud penetration lags in India.

So, what is the key to unlock cloud consumption in India? Artificial Intelligence.

AI has the capacity to revolutionise cloud computing in India and birth next-gen solutions for India. With this in mind, Ola Krutrim is looking to develop the cloud ecosystem in India. The company is looking to build a vibrant and massive startup ecosystem consisting of millions of developers. 1, 10, or 100 million developers? Why not, says Shah. India must dream big and scale with simple solutions.

The new tech wave in India: artificial intelligence

Every 25 years, there is a tremendous technological shift that takes place. We are witnessing one, said Shah, with the emergence of AI. The shift has caused Ola Krutrim to rethink the cloud, to prioritise simplicity over complex solutions and to democratise the cloud by making it affordable.

Shah then demonstrated how AI had optimised every level of the Krutrim Cloud Stack. He started with the data centre, moving on to the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) layer. This layer, he said, is one that has to be rethought, as most of the costs and resource underutilization happens here. The company believes that this layer will undergo the most transformation in the stack, becoming AI-optimised IaaS. The next layer he discussed was Platform as a Service (PaaS). These platforms, that have been used by traditional applications, will also be adapted to serve the AI workloads above. At the top are the AI-specific platforms, which will change with the emergence of new models and new architectures.

Building for a spectrum of developers

Mittal took over the second half of the workshop, describing services for a spectrum of developers – from the highly experienced developers to novices. His segment featured a series of videos and demos on GPU as a service, from the experts who want to rent GPUs, to the developers who want to use the services of the models, and finally novices who want to see how AI models work with the Krutrim playground app, where users can compare different hosted models.

The session wrapped with a Q&A session with the audience. You can catch all of these highlights, and more, by checking out the workshop video, here.