Why I built my own cloud from scratch in India

"Building a cloud platform is easy. Building a cloud platform in India that doesn't make you want to scream at your credit card statement? That's the real challenge."

It started with a simple $5/month droplet. Then came the database. Then the staging environment. Then the logs. Before I knew it, I was paying $100+ a month for a project that was barely serving a few thousand users.

But the price wasn't even the worst part. It was the USD pricing.

The Currency Friction

If you're a developer in India, you know the drill. You sign up for a service, enter your card details, and then... wait. Is your card enabled for international transactions? Did the OTP come through? Is your bank going to flag this as suspicious and block your card at 2 AM on a deployment night?

And then there's the exchange rate. You're not just paying $5. You're paying $5 plus the bank's markup, plus the currency conversion fee, all while the Rupee fluctuates. It's a constant mental tax that Indian developers have to pay just to use the basic tools of their trade.

The Decision to Build

I looked at the options. I could keep paying the "USD tax," or I could try to build something local. Something that understood UPI, Indian Rupee pricing, and didn't require a high-limit credit card just to deploy a React app.

I didn't want to just be another reseller of AWS or GCP. I wanted to control the hardware. I wanted the performance that only bare metal can provide.

The Hardware: Dell R720 & Proxmox

I started hunting for hardware. I managed to score a couple of Dell PowerEdge R720 servers. These are workhorses—dual Intel Xeon processors, 128GB of RAM, and plenty of drive bays.

Setting them up was its own adventure. Dealing with data centers in a Tire 3 city in West Bengal, figuring out networking, and ensuring 99.9% uptime.

I settled on a stack that I knew could scale:

• Proxmox VE for virtualization and managing the physical nodes.
• K8s (Kubernetes) for orchestrating the customer containers.
• Harbor for the private container registry.
• ArgoCD for GitOps-based deployment flow.

I spent months writing the orchestration layer. I wanted a developer experience that felt like Heroku but ran on my own steel. I built the image-builder-worker in Python to handle BuildKit-powered builds and the image-logger to stream real-time logs directly to the browser.

The Result: Abasthan

"Abasthan" means "place" or "residence" in Bengali. I wanted to build a place where Indian developers could host their apps without the fear of international credit card failures or fluctuating currency rates.

Today, Abasthan is a fully functional PaaS. You can push your code to GitHub, and we'll build, deploy, and scale it on our bare-metal infrastructure right here in India.

Why does this matter?

1. Performance: Lower latency for Indian users and the raw power of dedicated hardware.
2. Simplicity: No complex VPCs or IAM roles. Just click and deploy.
3. Stability: Pay in INR. No international transaction headaches.