Drones rush into the clouds – Newspaper Kommersant No. 145 (7346) of 08/11/2022

Kommersant learned that Yandex can transfer the development of unmanned transport technologies abroad and is already transferring the work of these services to the cloud infrastructure of foreign providers. Yandex assures that the source code of the project will remain in Russia, but the company is thinking about entering new foreign markets, such as Serbia.

Yandex plans to transfer from Russia to Israel the development of technologies for the development of unmanned taxis and delivery robots, a Kommersant source in the company’s specialized division told Kommersant. According to him, several potential names of the new structure are being discussed in the company. Among them are roovvy.ai, avride.ai and avnear.ai. According to the who is service, the last two domains were taken at the end of June and the end of July, the owner of the domains hid himself with privacy settings.

Kommersant’s interlocutor in the company also notes that the Yandex team, which develops drones, has begun transferring its processes from domestic platforms to foreign services. In particular, specialists want to move from the Startrack internal task manager to YouTrack or Jira, and transfer the system code of the project from the Yandex internal repository to GitHub (a service for hosting IT projects and their joint development, owned by Microsoft). Kommersant discovered a closed corporate account on GitHub called roovvy.ai.

By mid-September, Yandex employees plan to transfer the work of their services that ensure the operation of unmanned vehicles from internal infrastructure to foreign cloud platforms, this idea was discussed at one of the meetings of the specialized division on July 15. “It was about the fact that by September the project learned to live with the most critical processes for itself on the cloud infrastructure. This is necessary so that, if necessary, we can quickly transfer work from our infrastructure to external clouds, such as Amazon, ”one of the meeting participants explained to Kommersant.

Yandex refused to tell Kommersant whether the company owns the avride.ai and avnear.ai domains. The company only assured that the entire source code and technology of unmanned vehicles remain in Russia. “In some foreign markets, we do use external cloud services, as in a number of countries the legislation requires storing local data on their territory. Now we are looking at new geography, for example Serbia,” Yandex said, adding that each new location implies that part of the project team will work there.

According to Kommersant’s interlocutor in one of the relevant ministries, after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine and the sanctions that followed, Russian developers of unmanned vehicles began to experience difficulties with the purchase of equipment: “Lidars, video cameras, gyroscopes are not widely available components on the market, their produces a narrow number of foreign companies under the order. The acquisition of components has become more complicated due to logistics, and many of them are also dual-use goods, so their purchase has become extremely problematic, confirms Vladimir Arlazarov, CEO of Smart Engines.

It can be assumed that by transferring the work of its services to external clouds, Yandex seeks to ensure mobility, emphasize its international status, and also reduce sanctions risks, Mr. Arlazarov believes. For categories such as AI and transport, cloud computing should be as close to the consumer as possible, adds Anton Zakharchenko, director of cloud business strategy at T1 Cloud.

Nikita Korolev, Julia Silence