“Russian cloud”: what domestic startups use virtual infrastructure
In the previous article, we looked at large American projects that chose a virtual infrastructure for their work. Now it's the turn of the Russian projects.
In 2016, the cloud industry in Russia grew by an impressive 20% (more than predicted a year earlier). The market is inferior to the US in terms of volume, but it is predicted to further growth .
In Russia , their “unicorns” did not appear - startups with an estimate of more than $ 1 billion - but quite a lot of technology companies are working on the market. They fuel the development of cloud technologies and, in particular, IaaS.
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This service in the domestic market is more in demand than in many other countries.
Based on our experience, we’ll tell you about five Russian companies that are building their work on a virtual infrastructure .
/ photo by MaxPixel CC
In the previous article, we recalled Uber and its complex cloud architecture. The BelkaCar project also connects users and cars using a mobile application. The infrastructure requirements in this niche are high, and in the case of BelkaCar all the more: the service is built on the basis of several logical modules for each specific task - servicing the user application, rent, telematics, billing, and so on.
The project initially chose IaaS, preparing for the growth in the number of users of the car sharing system. The founders of the startup understood that the application was waiting for unpredictable loads.
First, the company operates in two markets at once - B2B and B2C, which can use the platform in different ways. Secondly, interaction with the client serves a significant set of functions, in addition to booking: opening and closing the car, completing the lease, monitoring the driving style of drivers.
And the last factor - the company expected market growth. It really happened - the number of trips on the car sharing model in Moscow, where BelkaCar operates, is growing , and, accordingly, the load on the system increases.
In 2016, the Russian company “KarOperator” took up the creation of a national base of used cars. This project is designed to help buyers get reliable information about the history and condition of cars.
A number of its components are located on the leased infrastructure. IaaS, in particular, serves the database server and its mirror, the file storage server and the application server. As in the case of BelkaCar, the infrastructure load may significantly increase in the future - users turned to a similar Moscow project more than 3.5 million times in 2 years.
KUBIT Company solves IT problems for its customers - assistance in migration to a cloud platform, to data centers, infrastructure design and maintenance. With the help of IaaS, the company was able to expand the list of its services and provide customers with additional features, such as organizing a disaster recovery site. The company is financially responsible for the availability of client infrastructure, and IaaS has become one of the additional measures to improve the reliability of services.
Another example of using virtual infrastructure for customer service is access to the cloud platform of the outsourcing company City-call . The service works as an external call center with integration with CRM systems and customer sites. In the cloud, the company is backing up, quickly restoring virtual machines and quickly deploying new infrastructures. According to a recent survey, more than half of contact centers choose the cloud as the basis of their platform. At the same time, the IaaS model provides greater maneuverability - call centers do not have to worry about recovery, storage, hosting, reservations, and load balancing.
The architecture of the Wagon Exchange RailCommerce is also based in the cloud. Participants in the rail freight industry are working with the site - it helps to connect wagon owners with customers and infrastructure owners. In a short period of time since the transfer of the Wagon Exchange to IaaS, the number of user companies increased from 10% of all participants in the freight market to 12%. The site owners are considering the possibility of its further expansion, including through new ways of transportation, so the virtual infrastructure of the platform must be ready for the corresponding loads.
As the example of Western colleagues shows , this factor is a priority both in the United States and in Russia. Ilya Frenklach, IT director of BelkaCar, says that he made a bet on the virtual infrastructure because of its flexibility. At a very early stage, the company understood that peak loads in the process of working with users and telematic equipment can be a challenge to their own project capacities.
As already mentioned, technically BelkaCar is a complex, multicomponent structure. The cloud helps car sharing not only withstand a large flow of requests, but also to test new technologies without losing performance. The same approach is used by Zed Russia. In the cloud, it deploys new mobile content delivery services.
For its base, “CarOperator” made high demands on the future partner provider, realizing how important constant availability is for this type of service. The company needed the provider to ensure the implementation of a full database backup at least once a day and incremental backup — at least once an hour.
City-call combines leased virtual infrastructure with its own and leased servers, says Dmitry Mantorov, technical director of the company. In this bundle, the cloud also helps to achieve a high level of reliability.
At the first stages of the development of the database of used cars, “KarOperator” worked on its servers. According to Alexey Vasilyev, technical project manager, it quickly became clear that the development of the base would entail an increase in the cost of infrastructure maintenance. The IaaS model allowed us to save resources, actually using only the space and power that is required at a particular moment.
The choice of KUBIT was also dictated by savings. In this case, cost savings for customers with a limited budget and the need for a reliable disaster recovery service.
RailCommerce sees the value of IaaS in solving all infrastructure tasks. The company saves resources on the development of its platform. Scaling, load balancing, and fault tolerance are the responsibility of the partner.
Ilya Egorov, head of the IT department of the Kokoc Group, says that together with the savings, IaaS provides a field for experimentation. When the company needed to deploy 2000 servers for a short time, it did not have to spend money on the purchase of equipment - it was enough to contact your partner and achieve the desired effect on the leased infrastructure.
Besides KUBIT, this task was also a priority for RailCommerce. The peculiarity of the Wagon Exchange is the work with companies from several countries. Because of this, it was important for the site to meet the legal requirements for handling personal data. The IaaS provider took on the task of bringing all changes in the RailCommerce infrastructure into compliance with the law.
A similar situation occurred in the history of the Delivery Club food delivery service. With the release of new requirements for working with personal data, the company decided to “move” from the Netherlands to Russia. IaaS-provider helped the company make the transition to the Russian infrastructure within a few hours.
As practice shows, domestic companies in the global sense have the same motives in switching to a virtual infrastructure as Western colleagues: flexibility, reliability and the desire to “untie their hands” to work on internal processes.
But there are specific aspects, such as compliance with the law. Most cases were dictated by the main desire to improve business efficiency, eliminating the main enemies in the way of startups - unforeseen loads, risks and costs.
PS Materials on the topic from the First Corporate IaaS Blog:
In 2016, the cloud industry in Russia grew by an impressive 20% (more than predicted a year earlier). The market is inferior to the US in terms of volume, but it is predicted to further growth .
In Russia , their “unicorns” did not appear - startups with an estimate of more than $ 1 billion - but quite a lot of technology companies are working on the market. They fuel the development of cloud technologies and, in particular, IaaS.
')
This service in the domestic market is more in demand than in many other countries.
Based on our experience, we’ll tell you about five Russian companies that are building their work on a virtual infrastructure .
/ photo by MaxPixel CC
BelkaCar and IaaS
In the previous article, we recalled Uber and its complex cloud architecture. The BelkaCar project also connects users and cars using a mobile application. The infrastructure requirements in this niche are high, and in the case of BelkaCar all the more: the service is built on the basis of several logical modules for each specific task - servicing the user application, rent, telematics, billing, and so on.
The project initially chose IaaS, preparing for the growth in the number of users of the car sharing system. The founders of the startup understood that the application was waiting for unpredictable loads.
First, the company operates in two markets at once - B2B and B2C, which can use the platform in different ways. Secondly, interaction with the client serves a significant set of functions, in addition to booking: opening and closing the car, completing the lease, monitoring the driving style of drivers.
And the last factor - the company expected market growth. It really happened - the number of trips on the car sharing model in Moscow, where BelkaCar operates, is growing , and, accordingly, the load on the system increases.
Who else
In 2016, the Russian company “KarOperator” took up the creation of a national base of used cars. This project is designed to help buyers get reliable information about the history and condition of cars.
A number of its components are located on the leased infrastructure. IaaS, in particular, serves the database server and its mirror, the file storage server and the application server. As in the case of BelkaCar, the infrastructure load may significantly increase in the future - users turned to a similar Moscow project more than 3.5 million times in 2 years.
KUBIT Company solves IT problems for its customers - assistance in migration to a cloud platform, to data centers, infrastructure design and maintenance. With the help of IaaS, the company was able to expand the list of its services and provide customers with additional features, such as organizing a disaster recovery site. The company is financially responsible for the availability of client infrastructure, and IaaS has become one of the additional measures to improve the reliability of services.
Another example of using virtual infrastructure for customer service is access to the cloud platform of the outsourcing company City-call . The service works as an external call center with integration with CRM systems and customer sites. In the cloud, the company is backing up, quickly restoring virtual machines and quickly deploying new infrastructures. According to a recent survey, more than half of contact centers choose the cloud as the basis of their platform. At the same time, the IaaS model provides greater maneuverability - call centers do not have to worry about recovery, storage, hosting, reservations, and load balancing.
The architecture of the Wagon Exchange RailCommerce is also based in the cloud. Participants in the rail freight industry are working with the site - it helps to connect wagon owners with customers and infrastructure owners. In a short period of time since the transfer of the Wagon Exchange to IaaS, the number of user companies increased from 10% of all participants in the freight market to 12%. The site owners are considering the possibility of its further expansion, including through new ways of transportation, so the virtual infrastructure of the platform must be ready for the corresponding loads.
What gives IaaS
1. Scalability
As the example of Western colleagues shows , this factor is a priority both in the United States and in Russia. Ilya Frenklach, IT director of BelkaCar, says that he made a bet on the virtual infrastructure because of its flexibility. At a very early stage, the company understood that peak loads in the process of working with users and telematic equipment can be a challenge to their own project capacities.
“The cloud allows you to quickly adapt to changing loads, and therefore save on support and your own nerves,” says Ilya.RailCommerce operators also from the very beginning thought about how the site would behave with the growth of data volume and application functionality.
“It is the cloud infrastructure that allows for such flexibility in design and development. Any other options look more like a compromise, ”says Sergei Gorsky, a member of the board of directors of the company that manages the Wagon Exchange.The same thoughts are expressed by the employees of Kaspersky Lab and the National Open Education Platform. The amount of required resources, as a rule, is not predicted at the planning stage, and IaaS allows adding additional capacity when the need arises due to, for example, such a factor as seasonality. This is how the cloud helps Hotels.ru hotel reservation service to cope with the pre-holiday traffic.
2. Reliability
As already mentioned, technically BelkaCar is a complex, multicomponent structure. The cloud helps car sharing not only withstand a large flow of requests, but also to test new technologies without losing performance. The same approach is used by Zed Russia. In the cloud, it deploys new mobile content delivery services.
For its base, “CarOperator” made high demands on the future partner provider, realizing how important constant availability is for this type of service. The company needed the provider to ensure the implementation of a full database backup at least once a day and incremental backup — at least once an hour.
City-call combines leased virtual infrastructure with its own and leased servers, says Dmitry Mantorov, technical director of the company. In this bundle, the cloud also helps to achieve a high level of reliability.
3. Savings
At the first stages of the development of the database of used cars, “KarOperator” worked on its servers. According to Alexey Vasilyev, technical project manager, it quickly became clear that the development of the base would entail an increase in the cost of infrastructure maintenance. The IaaS model allowed us to save resources, actually using only the space and power that is required at a particular moment.
The choice of KUBIT was also dictated by savings. In this case, cost savings for customers with a limited budget and the need for a reliable disaster recovery service.
RailCommerce sees the value of IaaS in solving all infrastructure tasks. The company saves resources on the development of its platform. Scaling, load balancing, and fault tolerance are the responsibility of the partner.
Ilya Egorov, head of the IT department of the Kokoc Group, says that together with the savings, IaaS provides a field for experimentation. When the company needed to deploy 2000 servers for a short time, it did not have to spend money on the purchase of equipment - it was enough to contact your partner and achieve the desired effect on the leased infrastructure.
4. Compliance with legislation
Besides KUBIT, this task was also a priority for RailCommerce. The peculiarity of the Wagon Exchange is the work with companies from several countries. Because of this, it was important for the site to meet the legal requirements for handling personal data. The IaaS provider took on the task of bringing all changes in the RailCommerce infrastructure into compliance with the law.
A similar situation occurred in the history of the Delivery Club food delivery service. With the release of new requirements for working with personal data, the company decided to “move” from the Netherlands to Russia. IaaS-provider helped the company make the transition to the Russian infrastructure within a few hours.
As practice shows, domestic companies in the global sense have the same motives in switching to a virtual infrastructure as Western colleagues: flexibility, reliability and the desire to “untie their hands” to work on internal processes.
But there are specific aspects, such as compliance with the law. Most cases were dictated by the main desire to improve business efficiency, eliminating the main enemies in the way of startups - unforeseen loads, risks and costs.
PS Materials on the topic from the First Corporate IaaS Blog:
- Guide: Feasibility calculations to justify the implementation of IaaS
- How IaaS-clouds help in service development projects
- Cases of migration and deployment of infrastructure in the cloud IaaS
- IaaS cloud load balancing: why you need it and how it works
- Guide: IaaS for the business "brick by brick"
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/345644/
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