Powering 12 million daily bus rides on AWS with Chalo Mobility

For millions of people, buses are the sole viable option for daily transport, but bus travel infrastructure can be deeply flawed. Passengers may have no information about bus arrival times, leading to long waits at bus stops. Bus operators may lack visibility into their fleet operations, leaving them unable to track whether buses are running scheduled routes, meeting service standards, or properly collecting fares. Inefficient bus operations contribute to urban congestion and carbon emissions.

When Chalo launched in 2014, the company sought to change the public transport experience and transform urban mobility. To accomplish its mission, Chalo chose AWS from the beginning, building cloud infrastructure that could support its growth while scaling massively and maintaining reliability.

The company participated in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP) to accelerate its cloud migration and modernization journey. Through AWS MAP, Chalo consolidated workloads across on-premises infrastructure and other cloud providers cost-efficiently. Moreover, with its AWS Enterprise Discount Program, the Chalo team can innovate, scale, and launch new products on AWS with predictable costs, transparent pricing, and service discounts.

As Chalo evolved, AWS provided the comprehensive capabilities needed to innovate with new AI technologies, from deploying models that automatically count passengers and curb ticket loss to optimizing schedules and boosting efficiency.

Using AWS, Chalo has turned bus transportation into a data-driven service that benefits passengers, operators, and cities alike. For passengers, the Chalo mobile app provides near real-time bus tracking, showing exactly when buses will arrive at stops along with a live occupancy (crowdedness) indicator. The app also offers multiple digital ticketing options, including mobile tickets, mobile passes, and Chalo’s own offline wallet—designed in-house and facilitating instant payment without internet connectivity.

For operators, Chalo provides web dashboards and mobile applications that deliver complete visibility into fleet operations: tracking vehicle locations, connecting to live bus camera feeds, monitoring driver behavior, and measuring revenue in near real time. The company also developed AI models to predict ridership demand and optimize bus routes, helping operators reduce the number of empty or overfilled buses while cutting fuel consumption.

Chalo’s architecture runs on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, with AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine. Using this setup, Chalo can scale computing resources automatically based on demand without needing to manage servers.

All application traffic is routed through Amazon CloudFront, a service that securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds across Chalo’s markets. Using a serverless approach, the infrastructure scales up during peak commuting hours and scales down during off-peak times, optimizing both performance and cost. To maintain near-constant availability, Chalo runs its infrastructure across multiple AWS Regions and Availability Zones, with disaster recovery sites that comply with data governance requirements. The company was also an early adopter of the AWS Region in Hyderabad when it launched in 2022.

For compute, Chalo relies on AWS Graviton processors, which are designed to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances, which let Chalo run fault-tolerant workloads for a discount of up to 90 percent compared with Amazon EC2 On-Demand prices. This combination of cost-optimization strategies empowers Chalo to scale efficiently while keeping operational expenses manageable.

Chalo also works with AWS Partners, as well as independent software vendors through AWS Marketplace, to access specialized offerings as its needs change. “The accessibility and ease of use of AWS is world-class,” says Atmesh Mishra, associate vice president of engineering at Chalo Mobility. “Even though the world is getting more expensive, AWS gives us more value for every dollar that we spend.”

Chalo’s solution on AWS currently supports 30,000 buses across more than 100 cities in India, Peru, and the Philippines. The company powers 12 million rides daily, amounting to more than 4 billion rides annually, and its mobile app has reached 60–70 million app sessions each month. Chalo has issued 2 million Chalo cards for contactless payments and facilitated 1 billion digital ticket purchases in cash-dominant customer segments.

“Using AWS as our underlying infrastructure, we are able to deliver our solution to millions of people, almost 100 percent of the time, with great performance,” says Vinayak Bhavnani, chief technology officer at Chalo Mobility.

By providing near real-time bus information, Chalo saves each commuter 30–40 minutes in wait times each day—time that was previously lost standing at bus stops. Chalo also helps avoid an estimated 4.04 million tons of CO₂ emissions annually by making public transport more reliable and convenient. The use of electric buses in Mumbai has avoided 9,800 tons of CO₂ over 2.5 years. Chalo itself avoids 32 tons of CO₂ annually by using the cloud instead of on-premises data centers.

And through cost-optimization strategies, Chalo cut costs by 45–50 percent over one quarter and reinvested those savings into the expansion of service coverage. The company plans to scale from 30,000 to more than 100,000 buses within 2 years while expanding its convenient ticketing solutions and multimodal mobility services.