Yandex Blog

Yandex.Cloud Now Available for All Enterprise Users in Russia

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.

Yandex Provides Cloud Platform to Companies Operating in Russia

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.