At Yandex, we have always been committed to spreading technology and supporting other companies’ development by providing various APIs and open sourcing Yandex technologies. More recently, in recognition of the need for an advanced cloud service in Russia, we started building a cloud platform as an important step in advancing the global tech ecosystem and offering useful solutions to external companies.
And last July we announced that we planned to ramp up our Yandex.Cloud initiative beyond the experimental phase. Today in a press release, Yandex announced that it has advanced Yandex.Cloud to provide companies with low-cost and flexible IT solutions that include scalable virtual infrastructure with multiple management options, automated services for the labour-intensive management tasks of popular databases systems, and AI-based Yandex services. Yandex.Cloud also offers flexible pricing to suit different companies’ diverse needs and is deployed across multiple local data centers, enabling companies to store and use databases containing personal data in Russia as required by law.
As part of the development of Yandex.Cloud, Yandex invited over 50 leading Russian and international companies to test the service and provide feedback on the platform. Since April 2018, companies have included industry leaders such as Tinkoff Bank, S7 Airlines and X5 Retail Group. Other companies that shared their feedback included Bitrix24, which offers CRM as a service, English learning platform SkyEng, and call center voice platform Voxiplant.
“We launched Bitrix24 in 2012 having chosen to use a cloud infrastructure right at the outset. This was what let us quickly scale up or down. Starting from 2015, the Russian segment of Bitrix24 is hosted in Russia to comply with the legal requirements. None of the leading global providers of cloud infrastructure run their data centers in Russia. This is why we are closely watching local market players and support the development of Russia's cloud platforms. Having participated in Yandex.Cloud's beta testing, we can appreciate the seriously systematic approach even at this point. This approach will help the company build a genuinely geographically distributed cloud platform with a full range of services,” says Alexander Demidov, head of cloud services at Bitrix24.
“Our product lets hundreds of thousands of people make progress in learning English. It is crucial for us that a cloud platform provides a stable and reliable service, as this is something that directly affects our customer experience. We have tested Yandex.Cloud and can admit that even at this point it satisfies the needs of a part of our services. We are positive that the new cloud platform will soon meet our expectations regarding our other services and challenges as well,” says Sergey Safonov, head of software development at SkyEng.
“We have a long history with Yandex, especially using their SpeechKit technology in our Voximplant communication app platform. Our plans are to move our development and testing environment to Yandex.Cloud and use this platform for hosting some of our services aimed at our Russian customers,” says Andrey Kovalenko, CTO at Voximplant.
Thanks to the many companies who have helped test Yandex.Cloud, we have been able to build a service that meets the cloud-computing needs of the local market. We will continue product development by adding new infrastructure services, additional services based on Yandex’s machine intelligence and analytics tools, and developer tools intended to simplify the entire code lifecycle management within Yandex.Cloud.
Access to Yandex.Cloud is currently available on request and will be open to all by the end of 2018.