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Cloud Without Complexity: Inside CloudPe’s Mission to Redefine Affordable Cloud Infrastructure
CloudPe is redefining cloud adoption with simple, high-performance, affordable infrastructure. This article explores how the platform removes complexity, ensures predictable pricing, and delivers enterprise-grade reliability for modern Indian businesses.
Ishan Talathi, the Founder & CEO of CloudPe
As cloud adoption accelerates across India, businesses face a pressing challenge: balancing performance, simplicity, and affordability. While global hyperscalers offer vast feature sets, many organizations still struggle with steep learning curves, unpredictable billing, and infrastructure complexity. CloudPe has emerged as a powerful alternative built around the idea of “cloud without complexity,” offering transparent pricing and high-performance infrastructure powered by open-source technologies.
In a conversation with The Indian Business Times, Ishan Talathi, the Founder & CEO of CloudPe, discusses how his team built a cloud platform that removes unnecessary complexity while delivering better performance and predictable pricing. From tackling hyperscaler complexity to delivering up to 30% cost savings, this interview sheds light on how CloudPe is changing cloud adoption for modern businesses.
Q1. CloudPe was built around the idea of removing cloud complexity. What were the biggest challenges you observed in traditional cloud adoption that motivated this approach?
Most businesses struggle with one core decision: whether to keep their infrastructure on-premise or migrate to a large hyperscaler like Azure. When they explore hyperscalers, they immediately encounter thousands of overlapping services, each with different configurations and pricing models. For many organizations, this complexity becomes overwhelming. They spend more time figuring out what to choose than actually using the cloud. This makes cloud adoption slow, complicated, and intimidating for teams that simply want a reliable environment without unnecessary layers.
CloudPe was created to address this exact problem. We wanted to give customers the same comfort and familiarity they have with their on-premise environment, but with the flexibility, availability, and performance advantages the cloud offers. Our goal is to deliver cloud benefits without hyperscaler complexity. Users don’t have to decode dozens of services or navigate multi-layered configurations. Instead, they get a cloud experience that is powerful, predictable, and easy to manage from day one.
Q2. CloudPe claims up to 30% cost savings compared to global providers. What allows you to reduce costs without compromising performance?
We reduce costs by taking a highly optimized approach to infrastructure and software. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we rely heavily on robust, globally trusted open-source technologies like OpenStack, originally developed by NASA and Red Hat. These technologies are mature, widely tested, and freely available, which significantly lowers our R&D and manpower expenses. The money we save here directly translates into affordable pricing for our customers, without sacrificing reliability or scalability.
Additionally, we don’t follow the typical “startup freebies” model used by hyperscalers. We don’t offer one or two years of free service as a bait-and-switch tactic, only to charge high fees afterward. Our pricing is fair, fixed, and predictable from day one. This straightforward approach gives businesses a long-term cost advantage. As a result of these decisions, CloudPe not only offers lower pricing but also delivers 35–40% better performance than global providers across several components.
Q3. Transparent pricing is one of your strengths. Why is clarity in cloud pricing still uncommon, and how do businesses respond to CloudPe’s approach?
Most hyperscalers have several different pricing models for the same resource. For example, a virtual machine might have five pricing variations depending on usage time, bandwidth, storage type, or provisioning method. This complexity makes it extremely difficult for businesses to know what they will actually pay at the end of the month. As a result, many customers get unpredictable bills, including cases where a simple misconfiguration or a compromised workload has led to bills as high as one lakh rupees.
CloudPe takes the opposite approach. We provide a single, clear pricing method for each resource. If a customer chooses a particular VM or service, they know exactly what they will pay, and they will not receive hidden charges or sudden spikes. Businesses appreciate this model because it gives them full control over their cloud budget. Predictability builds trust, and customers value knowing that CloudPe will charge exactly what was agreed upon from day one.
Q4. CloudPe’s platform covers VMs, load balancers, storage, VPC, and more. How do you ensure users can manage everything easily in one place?
Ease of management was part of our architecture from the very beginning. In a traditional on-premise setup, customers would need different software tools for VMs, networking, storage, and load balancers, each with its own interface, authentication, and workflow. Managing all of these separately becomes confusing and time-consuming, especially for smaller teams. We wanted to remove that friction entirely.
With CloudPe, everything is accessible from one unified dashboard. Users log in once, choose the services they need, and manage them through the same interface. Billing, monitoring, scaling, and configuration all happen within this single environment. Whether they want just one service or the entire suite, the experience remains consistent. This design ensures that even non-technical users can navigate the platform comfortably while advanced users still have access to deeper controls.
Q5. Your ecosystem includes S3-compatible object storage and NVMe-based block storage. Which use cases are growing fastest among Indian businesses?
We’re seeing two distinct trends in India. Traditional enterprises, especially in sectors like manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, continue to rely on legacy applications built 15 - 25 years ago. These applications are designed to work with block storage, so demand from this segment remains strong. Block storage supports mission-critical databases and enterprise workloads where consistency and structure are important.
On the other hand, the newer generation of startups and digital-first businesses are rapidly shifting toward object storage. Most modern applications built in the last five years, especially those involving AI, analytics, and microservices, are designed to scale on object storage. These users prefer S3-compatible storage because it offers flexibility, high performance, and ease of integration. So while block storage remains essential for older systems, object storage is growing fastest among new-age Indian businesses.
Q6. Many cloud users worry about performance when choosing affordable solutions. How does CloudPe maintain reliability and performance across different workloads?
CloudPe’s performance advantage comes from carefully selecting every component of our infrastructure. We use high-performance AMD and Intel processor families that outperform the ones used by hyperscalers by 35 - 40%. Our storage, memory, and networking layers are chosen specifically to deliver better throughput and lower latency. This means users get faster applications, smoother workloads, and a more responsive environment across hosting, development, and AI/ML tasks.
Reliability is achieved through redundancy at every layer. All customer data is automatically stored in three separate copies within the cloud. Even if a disk or node fails, the system instantly switches to another copy, ensuring no data loss and minimal downtime. If an entire server goes offline, virtual machines automatically restart on another server within two minutes. This level of resilience gives customers the confidence that their applications will remain available even during unexpected issues.
Q7. CloudPe emphasizes simplicity. How do you balance advanced capabilities with an intuitive user experience?
As we expand our features, maintaining simplicity becomes more challenging, but we follow a structured approach. When a new user logs in, they see only the essential dashboard options. This ensures that business users or beginners aren’t overwhelmed. Our guides clearly explain the basic features, and customers can get their core workloads running without navigating advanced settings.
For engineers and developers who need deeper control, we offer an “Advanced Dashboard” for each feature. This secondary interface unlocks additional settings, customization options, and granular controls. It preserves CloudPe’s simplicity for everyday users while still supporting complex scenarios for technical teams. Both interfaces access the same resources, but the level of sophistication evolves based on user needs.
Q8. Kubernetes adoption is growing. What role does CloudPe’s Kubernetes service play in simplifying containerized development?
We offer Kubernetes as a service but with a different philosophy compared to hyperscalers. While Amazon and Google restrict certain parts of Kubernetes to maintain control on their side, we give customers full ownership of their clusters. They can deploy, configure, and operate Kubernetes just as they would on their own infrastructure, giving them complete flexibility.
Because Kubernetes is an advanced technology, we keep it hidden in the Advanced Dashboard rather than overwhelming new users. Developers who want full control can access it easily and use it for microservices, CI/CD workflows, and scalable applications. This hybrid model gives startups and technical teams the freedom to run Kubernetes without limitations while keeping the main dashboard clean for general users.
Q9. CloudPe supports add-ons like firewalls and VPC. What security principles guide your product decisions?
Security is at the core of every cloud system we design. With our Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) feature, customers can isolate their mission-critical databases and applications inside a private environment that is not accessible from the public internet. Only a single outward-facing service needs exposure. This design ensures that attackers cannot directly access sensitive data, making intrusion significantly more difficult.
Beyond this, we provide Security Groups that function like firewalls but can be applied to all virtual machines under a customer’s account. Customers can control access by IP address, protocol, region, or even city starting with a default “deny all” rule for safety. For added protection, our cloud-based firewall service analyzes traffic and blocks malicious requests selectively while allowing legitimate users through. These layers work together to protect applications from evolving threats.
Q10. The cloud market is evolving quickly. Where do you see CloudPe’s biggest opportunities for growth?
We see strong momentum from enterprises moving away from on-premise infrastructure such as VMware or Nutanix. Running these environments has become costly and complex, so organizations are shifting to platforms like CloudPe for stability, affordability, and easier management. This trend is accelerating digital transformation for companies seeking cloud-native flexibility without inflated pricing.
The second major opportunity comes from businesses migrating away from hyperscalers. Many companies initially adopt global cloud providers but later face high bills and unnecessary complexity. CloudPe, powered by proven open-source technology and high-performance infrastructure, offers the same or better reliability at much lower costs. As more organizations prioritize cost control and operational simplicity, we expect this segment to grow rapidly.
The insights shared in this interview underline a clear shift in how companies are approaching cloud infrastructure. As organizations outgrow on-premise environments and reconsider the rising costs of hyperscalers, CloudPe presents a practical alternative rooted in transparency, open-source technology, and performance-focused architecture. By eliminating unnecessary complexity and giving users greater control, CloudPe is carving out a distinct space in India’s cloud ecosystem.
Whether supporting traditional enterprises or powering new-age startups, CloudPe’s vision remains centered on accessibility, reliability, and long-term value. As cloud needs evolve, the company is positioned to play a significant role in helping businesses scale with confidence, proving that powerful cloud infrastructure doesn’t have to be complicated or cost-prohibitive.
