IT specialist's impressions of the GoCloud conference

Today the company has extensive experience and a significant number of its own developments in setting up pipelines, orchestrators, container solutions, monitoring services, migration, management and administration, infrastructure deployment, security, development, storage and backup, cloud technologies, solutions in terms of AI & ML.

The following services were demonstrated at the conference:

• Evolution IaaS;

• Evolution Storage;

• Evolution K8s;

• Evolution AppServices;

• Evolution DataPlatform;

• Evolution DBaaS.

It was especially pleasant to see that not prototype solutions were being put forward, but complete finished products, configured for full implementation in modern production, meeting all current realities, reflected on company website. As was evident from numerous presentations, there are solutions for most existing requests from users, including:

• Platforms: Cloud.ru Evolution, Cloud.ru Advanced, Cloud.ru ML Space;

• Infrastructure: Virtual machines, Private cloud, Basalt open source software product licenses, VMware, Rosa operating system, Red OS operating system based on Linux;

• Networks: Secure virtual network, Load balancers, SNAT gateways, Secure private networks, Content delivery network, Server load balancers, Secure VPN connection;

• Storage and backup: S3 Object Storage, Content Delivery Network, Block Data Storage, Enterprise Data Storage, VMWare Technologies (Backup Server / Disaster Recovery);

• Databases: MySQL, Greenplum, Hadoop, Apache Kafka and Apache Nifi, Clickhouse, PostgressSQL, MongoDB;

• Containerization: Kubernetes, Setveless functions, Containers in the cloud, Private registry for OCI artifacts, Container protection;

• Development: Integration with the cloud via API, Apache Kafka Broker, Redis caching service, RabbitMQ queue broker, Memcached-based caching, Load testing, Microservices development;

• Data analytics: Big data processing, Elasticsearch search system, BigData processing and analysis, Database audit and protection, MongoDB management, Graph data analysis, Log collection and storage;

Product line Cloud.ru represented in three sectors:

• Cloud edges (Blue section);

• Edges of Technology (Orange Section);

• The Edge of Possibility (Green Section).

Cloud edges (blue section)

This section was characterized by a purely technical focus. The first speaker was Peter Predtechensky (Client Solutions Architect at Cloud.ru), who spoke in general terms about how the Cloud.ru Evolution service works, what capabilities and advantages the new cloud platform has.

He showed the user's personal account, the graphical interface and talked about the main cloud services. In particular, they talked about the advanced development of Cloud.ru Evolution and the features of creating a Kubernetes cluster.

Sergey Lysanov (Head of Cloud.ru), presented a report on the topic “Software-Defined Storage Architecture” and talked about how virtual machine disks work with storage and how to scale a cluster for data storage.

Immediately after him was Pavel Kutakov (Architect of PaaS services Cloud.ru), who, using the example of a real product problem, showed how to implement the architecture of a payment system in the cloud without virtual machines, using infrastructure components in the form of managed services hosted in Cloud.ru Evolution Container Apps.

There was also a report by Mikhail Bondarevsky (Head of Cloud.ru) who told the public “How to develop and launch applications using the Cloud.ru Evolution Container Apps service.” In the report he:

• Showed why services are needed Cloud.ru Evolution Container Apps and Artifact Registry.

• Demonstrated the operation of services according to given scenarios.

• Noted key opportunities Cloud.ru Evolution Container Apps and Artifact Registry.

• He spoke separately about security and monitoring.

As shown in several reports, the company is actively working on its own hyperscaler. Timur Khakimyanov, head of the department, spoke about this in the main hall Cloud.ru.

A separate conversation turned to Spark and its implementation in big data technologies, which Anton Chevychalov and Alexey Litsov spoke about in detail at a report on working with big data. In it, the speakers gave a comprehensive overview of existing solutions from the history of industry development to a comparison of Cloud.ru data platforms and other cloud providers.

Edge of Technology (orange section)

The orange section contained equally important reports on at least three key issues: Open Source, LLM and Cyber ​​Security. Read reports on topics such as:

• API & LLM: GigaChat as a service (Alexander Prudchenko);

• Open Source: evolution and revolution: Oleg Bondar (YDB), Anton Bystrov (Cloud.ru), Anatoly Shipov (SberTech), Dmitry Kudyukin (ITKey);

• Containers and Kubernetes: Modern attacks and measures to imitate them (Artem Bachevsky, MTS RED).

All development in the field of generative content and cloud technologies, chat bots, large language models is now based on these things. The latter allow solving a whole class of problems from machine translation to monitoring social networks, public forums and public platforms of national importance. In addition, not a single large production today can do without open source solutions. There are many factors involved at the same time:

• Access to open source code for the purpose of modifying it for commercial product purposes;

• A community of contributors who constantly support the solution infrastructure, making a significant contribution to the creation of entire services, modules, libraries and architectures;

• Licensing, which helps overcome many administrative and legal issues even at the stage of system design and business requirements analysis.

A separate point worth noting are solutions in the field of information security. At all stages of the conference and even in my personal conversations with representatives of MTS RED companies, Sber cybersecurity specialists, as well as popularizers and independent researchers, this was repeatedly stated, and various options were proposed for solving the issues and problems of cloud security facing business.

Opinions were very different: from transferring data to the clouds without regard to current events to complete distrust in these technologies. At the same time, as I mentioned above, more and more often companies were leaning towards a hybrid format of work, that is, we do not transfer critical data to the cloud, while all other data can be safely loaded: they do not represent significant value or they can be quickly restored in the event of a cyber attack. various vectors.

The Edge of Possibility (green section)

In the green section there were business discussions and discussions on the topics of import substitution and security. Regional experts were responsible for this: Sergey Demidov (“Moscow Exchange”), Andrey Konishchev (PJSC “T Plus”), Alexey Krishtop (GC “Astra”), Sergey Volkov (Cloud.ru). Here they discussed modern challenges in the field of information security for banks, the public sector and industry, and what role the cloud plays in responding to these challenges.

Particular attention was paid to the issues of current laws and their impact on business, cloud import substitution and the presence of hybrid models, the information security complex: who is responsible for what.

After the discussion, the baton was picked up by Maria Gracheva (leader of the Cloud.ru direction), who told how to use hybrid and private clouds, fully covered their structure, and at the same time mentioned PaaS services.

This section contained purely product reviews from Cloud.ru developers Dmitry Nosov and Timur Shakirbekov (“How the Cloud.ru marketplace works – we’ll show you with an example”), as well as Igor Khapov and Alexander Maltsev (“How innovations are created: Cloud R&D team. ru” and “Case: How to solve one small but NP-complete problem”). And the most interesting report, in my opinion, was the story from technology giants – large retail companies (M.Video-Eldorado, SberMarket, Magnit, Cloud.ru)

In the report-discussion “New approaches to working with the cloud: the experience of Russian companies,” the participants discussed how retailers were able to transfer their infrastructure to the cloud, how they were able to set up effective management of cloud resources, and transparently distribute costs. And most importantly, optimize your processes. We also talked about what role the Cloud.ru team played in this, what was done when setting up these large-scale processes. As part of this discussion, the focus of further development of Cloud.ru in FinOps was also highlighted.

That is, the company has a whole block of professionals who are ready to provide high-quality services that have proven their reliability and flexibility in making product decisions and help companies switch to cloud technologies, offering solutions that cover the needs of even the most demanding clients.

Final impressions

Of course, the conference is not only about reports. The organization of the entire event left a very good impression: both in terms of design and informality, and in terms of security, which is also important. The guests felt very free and relaxed: in addition to many business meetings of old partners, new acquaintances were also made on the site.

The informal part set the audience up for maximum positivity: a buffet was organized, and the band The Hatters performed at the afterparty (there was even record speeches). At the end, guests received commemorative merch.

In general, the conference left a favorable impression: the whole team worked perfectly, no failures or deviations from the stated conference plan were noticed, both in terms of technical aspects and design. The reports were selected to be fascinating: those that I did not have time to attend at the conference, then I looked with interest at records. So, in my opinion, the celebration of five years of success was a success: both for the company itself and for the IT specialists who took part in the event. I would wish the Cloud.ru team further victories in their chosen direction – I look forward with interest to the expansion of their business and what they will tell about themselves and their work at the next GoCloud.