Yandex unveils public cloud platform – FinTech Futures

Russian search engine provider Yandex has launched its public cloud platform, Yandex.Cloud, enabling companies to develop and support web apps and services.

Yandex.Cloud is deployed across local data centres, allowing firms to store and use databases containing personal data in Russia “as required by law”.

Since April 2018, over 50 Russian and international companies including Tinkoff Bank, S7 Airlines and X5 Retail Group have been using Yandex.Cloud in test mode through an invite-only private preview.

“At this stage, we are testing the platform for hosting our cloud services where resources are needed on demand and within short timeframes,” says Viacheslav Tsyganov, VP for information technology at Tinkoff Bank.

Yandex.Cloud currently includes developer tools for programming languages such as Python and Go; and automated services for management tasks of databases systems such as PostgreSQL, ClickHouse (Yandex’s open source database management system) and MongoDB.

Future updates will include 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 the service is currently available on request and will be open to all by the end of 2018.

In April, we did an e-commerce spotlight on Yandex.Money. This is owned by Sberbank (75%) and Yandex (25%), and it has a dominant position in Russia’s online payments sector.