AravaliStack vs Amazon Web Services
AWS gives you hyperscaler capabilities at the cost of data sovereignty, vendor dependency, and unpredictable bills. AravaliStack gives you the same capabilities — on hardware you own, with zero egress fees and full regulatory compliance.
Feature-by-feature breakdown
Evaluated across the dimensions that matter to Indian enterprise buyers.
AWS pricing appears cheap on day one. The maths changes at scale.
Estimates based on ap-south-1 on-demand pricing and typical enterprise hardware procurement in India. Your mileage will vary — request a custom TCO analysis .
RBI's 2018 circular on storage of payment system data explicitly requires that all payment data be stored in India. AWS ap-south-1 satisfies data residency — but not data sovereignty. AWS, as a US-incorporated entity, is subject to the US CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act), which compels US companies to provide stored data to US authorities even when that data is held in Indian data centres. For regulated Indian financial entities, this is not a technical nuance — it is a fundamental compliance risk that no contractual arrangement can eliminate.
- You have no data residency obligations
- Your team is already AWS-certified
- You need global multi-region in 24 hours
- You are a startup with <1TB of data
- Budget unpredictability is acceptable
- RBI, SEBI, DPDP, or ABDM compliance is required
- You process sensitive financial or health data
- Data must never leave your premises
- You want predictable CapEx, not variable OpEx
- You refuse to pay ₹0.08/GB to move your own data
Choose AWS if…
- You have no data residency obligations
- Your team is already AWS-certified
- You need global multi-region in 24 hours
- You are a startup with <1TB of data
- Budget unpredictability is acceptable
Choose AravaliStack if…
- RBI, SEBI, DPDP, or ABDM compliance is required
- You process sensitive financial or health data
- Data must never leave your premises
- You want predictable CapEx, not variable OpEx
- You refuse to pay ₹0.08/GB to move your own data
| Dimension | AWS | AravaliStack |
|---|---|---|
| Data residency | Contractual only — hardware in US-controlled DCs | Physical — your hardware, your premises |
| RBI compliance | Requires complex contractual frameworks | Native — designed for RBI data localisation |
| DPDP Act 2023 | Cloud DPA required; complex processor chain | On-premise — you are sole Data Fiduciary |
| Egress fees | $0.08–$0.09 per GB | ₹0 — data moves on your own network |
| Pricing model | Variable, metered, unpredictable | Fixed CapEx + annual platform licence |
| Vendor lock-in | High — proprietary APIs, S3, Lambda, IAM | None — 100% open-source components |
| Air-gapped deployment | ✗ — requires internet for control plane | ✓ — fully air-gapped supported |
| Superscaler access | ✓ — global, instant | ~ — on your hardware; plan for capacity |
| GPU / ML workloads | SageMaker — data leaves your environment | KServe + MLflow — data stays on-prem |
| Uptime SLA | 99.99% (managed by AWS) | 99.95%+ (you manage with AravaliStack tooling) |
| Security posture | Shared responsibility model | Full control — zero trust by default |
| Kubernetes | EKS — managed but opinionated | Native Kubernetes — unmodified, portable |
| Object storage | S3 — proprietary lock-in | S3-compatible on-prem — fully portable |
| Cost transparency | Complex billing, 200+ line items | Real-time per-namespace cost attribution |
| Indian data centre | ✓ ap-south-1 (Mumbai) | ✓ Deployed in your own DC anywhere in India |
| Govt / Defence use | ✗ — foreign-controlled infrastructure | ✓ — NCIIPC-approved on-premise stack |
| Support language | English; IST hours limited | Hindi + English; IST business hours |
| Exit strategy | Expensive — egress fees + rewrites | Free — open standards, no lock-in |
- Total Cost of Ownership
- AWS — 5-Year Cost Model
(50-node equivalent, 100TB data, 500 engineers) - EC2 compute (r5.2xlarge × 50 × 5yr) ₹18.4 Cr
- Data egress (10TB/month × 5yr) ₹3.6 Cr
- RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, misc services ₹5.8 Cr
- Total 5-Year AWS Cost ₹31.1 Cr
- AravaliStack — 5-Year Cost Model
(50-node on-prem cluster, equivalent capacity) - Server hardware (50 nodes, amortised 5yr) ₹8.2 Cr
- Total 5-Year AravaliStack Cost ₹13.9 Cr
Ready to own your infrastructure?
Request a technical briefing and custom TCO analysis. We'll model your exact AWS spend against an AravaliStack deployment.