Ola moves tech workloads out of Microsoft's Azure, says Bhavish Aggarwal

As promised, Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Ola, has moved all of the company’s tech workloads from Microsoft’s Azure ecosystem to its own cloud, Krutrim, in a week’s time.

In a message on X, he said: “As committed, Azure spend is 0. All workloads on @Krutrium cloud. Within a week.”

Aggarwal also added that he and his company will help others move to its India stack. He also mentioned that over 2,500 developers have joined the platform.

“Will help others also exit and move to our own Indian stack. More than 2,500 devs have signed up!! Will be working with everyone to get onto our cloud services over the coming weeks,” he said on X.

The total number of registered developers was 2,423; of these, 1,883 were verified and 540 were unverified.

Although Krutrim managed to get 2,500 developers, there was no clarity if any companies have joined the platform or have shown interest in joining the platform.

On May 11, in an X post, Aggarwal had stated that he would move all the tech workload from the Azure platform to Krutrim. The move came after Aggarwal, a few days before that, criticised Microsoft-owned employment-focused social media platform LinkedIn for removing his post on pronoun illness, calling out the platform for imposing political ideology. He emphasised the need for India to develop its own tech and AI.

He further said: “This situation brings me to the need for us to build our own Indian tech platforms. I’m not against global tech companies. But as an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by western Big Tech monopolies and we will be culturally subsumed as the above experience shows,” said Aggarwal.

“This is not about Ola or any of my companies. Ola is too small to make any impact against this. I want to confront this forced ideology as a free-thinking Indian and do what I can in my capacity. So here are the actions I’m taking. Putting my money where my mouth is.”