Self-hosting FOSS and Profitability: Zerodha's Story
summary
Zerodha self-hosts a broad FOSS stack — Postgres, ClickHouse, MySQL, Redis, Kafka, NATS and apps like ERPNext, osTicket, Discourse, Airflow, Metabase running on vanilla EC2 rather than managed services. The platform handles about 20% of Indian equity transactions with a ~30‑person tech team and reports savings in the tens of millions; an industry example shows Datadog costs of $65M and AWS $40M. The claim: avoiding SaaS (RDS would be 100× cost at scale) enables performance tuning, faster regulatory changes, and lower vendor overhead.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:30Selfhosting FOSS
- 6:10How much have we saved
- 7:57Indirect savings
- 11:36Mitigating risks
- 12:57Myths
- 16:33Managed vs Selfhosting
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