In early September, we announced the launch of our intelligent public cloud platform, Yandex.Cloud. The first phase of our launch included organizations that requested access to the platform and the companies that started using Yandex.Cloud during the initial test period. After this preliminary rollout period, we are excited to announce that Yandex.Cloud is now available for all enterprise users in Russia.
The universal release of Yandex.Cloud is the culmination of our initiative to provide businesses in Russia with a cloud-based solution for powering their apps and services. Up to now, businesses in Russia have had limited options for advanced cloud computing platforms. With the release of Yandex.Cloud, Yandex is helping meet this demand for cloud services in Russia. Yandex.Cloud provides companies with flexible IT solutions using scalable virtual infrastructure, automated services for managing popular database systems, and AI-based Yandex services. Our cloud platform also complies with local regulations requiring the data of Russian internet users to remain in the country, as Yandex.Cloud is deployed in data centers across Russia.
In addition to the public release of Yandex.Cloud for all enterprise users in Russia, our cloud platform will now also be offering customers the opportunity to try alpha versions of new products, as noted by Yan Leshinsky, Head of Yandex.Cloud.
“Together with offering universal access to our platform, we are providing an opportunity to try alpha versions of our new products: a network load balancer, a Redis-based managed service, and data visualization service DataLens. We are also expanding our compute service, which will now let our users manage groups of virtual machines of the same type. This functionality will also be available in alpha. Our goal is to continually develop our platform while focusing on the vital needs of our customers and their regular feedback.”
Yandex.Cloud gives enterprise customers an opportunity to use the infrastructure and machine learning technologies behind Yandex services. In addition to the Yandex machine translation, speech recognition and speech synthesis services already available in Yandex.Cloud, the platform now also integrates a virtual machine image with a template preset to work with the Yandex.Dialogues skills platform. With this integration of the virtual machine image for Yandex.Dialogues, developers can more easily create skills for Alice and host them on the Yandex.Cloud platform.
During the first, limited phase of the Yandex.Cloud launch, select companies have had the opportunity to try Yandex.Cloud for working with data, web app development and hosting. We spoke with some of these early users of Yandex.Cloud to hear their thoughts on the service.
“We chose the Yandex.Cloud platform for hosting the websites of many brands within Condé Nast Russia," says Dmitry Klichugin, IT Director at Condé Nast Russia. "Our plan is to move all of our websites to Yandex.Cloud and start using Yandex’s cloud platform for collecting and processing data. Some of the factors which drew us to Yandex.Cloud include flexible pricing, the service’s reliability, out-of-box tools for data processing and machine learning services, as well as, importantly, the opportunity to store and process the data of our customers according to local regulations.”
“Yandex.Cloud has fully met all our expectations," notes Ivan Moyseev, head of software development at Hot-WiFi, a company that manages guest WiFi networks. "Data centers located in Russia, ‘database as a service’ providing everything we wanted, and a stable, low latency network between availability zones. A special mention should go to the development team and the customer support team, who are quick to answer any question. We received a lot of consultation and learned a lot from talking to the Yandex.Cloud team. It’s such a pleasure to deal with specialists who speak the same language as you and understand all your needs.”
“MerliON has developed a Commvault-based ‘backup-as-a-service’ product as part of our cloud distribution platform development. This solution lets us backup and restore our partners’ customer data to the cloud. After testing popular public cloud services, we chose Yandex.Cloud’s object storage to backup our clients’ data. Yandex.Cloud’s key advantages for us included triple data backup, a reasonable pricing structure and the availability of an API for cloud management,” says Anton Salov, head of MerliONCloud, a firm offering enterprise cloud solutions.
In the three months since the limited release of Yandex.Cloud, our cloud platform has attracted the interest of over ten thousand national and global businesses in Russia. We’re excited to today expand our cloud computing service to all interested enterprise users in the country. We look forward to more companies employing Yandex.Cloud for their needs and taking advantage of the new features we have planned for the service.