Reducing delivery time of new applications
Reducing delivery time of new applications
We have an in-house private cloud system and we have tried a few open source and proprietary solutions to improve our Infrastructure-as-a- Service environment. Nimbula Director meets all our requirements and lets us dramatically cut the time for testing and deployment.
Vlad Seliverstov, Chief of Advertising Services Operation at Yandex.
Company Profile:
Yandex is a Russian-born internet company which operates the largest search engine in Russia and develops a number of internet-based services and products in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Turkey. The company is one of three companies worldwide that have an international web index database.
Summary
Yandex uses Nimbula Director to run a private cloud for development and testing. With Nimbula’s APIs for elastic setup and teardown of instances, they were able to parallelize the QA process for a 90% time savings. Using the self-service capabilities of Nimbula Director, they have reduced the time for a developer to get access to a sandbox from a couple of days down to minutes.
The Problem
Bringing applications faster to production is a major drive for Yandex to implement a private cloud. Their current virtualized environment was not enough:
- Their daily suite of tests took 28 hours to complete with over 700 tests for each specific application.
- Developers had to wait 24 to 48 hours before new instances were provisioned for them by the administrators of the virtualized infrastructure
- The security model was limited and could not allow for multiple tenants to share the same infrastructure without risk of projects overlapping other projects
The Solution
With Nimbula Director, the team was able to deploy a private cloud to help with their concerns, dramatically improve their software delivery model, and fully leverage a developer-friendly infrastructure:
- Nimbula Director’s API-driven, elastic system allowed them to truly parallelize their tests by launching instances, running tests, and deleting them afterwards.
- Nimbula Director’s secure self-service capabilities allowed developers to get their instances immediately so that they could reach maximum productivity.
- Nimbula Director’s fine-grained security model allowed different teams and departments to share objects securely without any risk of contamination from other projects. The security model’s flexibility not only enabled central cloud administrators to share standard images with all teams but also enabled teams to selectively share objects between each other when needed.
In addition, Nimbula Director’s quality and wide range of hardware compatibility allowed Client to leverage the hardware of their choice without imposing a specific "shopping list".
Why Nimbula?
Yandex first tried a few open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions as well as a couple of proprietary solutions, but none had the polish, quality or features that satisfied them. They were amazed with the zero-touch installation experience. When Nimbula Director was introduced to the engineering team, they said that “It’s exactly what we were looking for.”
Tangible Results
- Cutting costs and increased efficiency - 4 hours of testing now in under 30 minutes - 90% speed-up