How to develop highload projects when foreign companies left Russia

Crisis: challenges and opportunities

Despite the fact that the maturity level of on-premises solutions varies across industries

different, in general Russian highload projectsin terms of development, they are quite comparable to foreign ones: Yandex and Avito have especially succeeded in this. In addition, we see many competitive solutions in the field of financial services on the market: from a technical point of view, there are a negligible number of failures, which is a good indicator. Banking applications receive prestigious world awards - Sber received 12 awards from the prestigious international award The Stevie Awards 2021, and Tinkoff became a laureate in five categories at once at The World’s Best Digital Banks 2020 award.

Highload projectis a horizontally scalable digital product to any theoretically achievable number of clients.

A significant obstacle to the development of Russianhighload projects in modern conditions have become the departure of Western companies from the market: most of the world's technology platforms depend on data storage systems and business assistance. In fact, there are only a few major players that provide solutions for highload platforms. Imported solutions saved time: using ready-made tools  promptly passed testing and predicted the progress of projects. Now that they have refused to provide services to Russian companies, there is a need to quickly replace them.

There are already ready-made solutions on the Russian market:for example, cloud platforms. CRM is an area in which our developments are less competitive compared to global solutions. Over the past few years, Russian companies have been able to evaluate various tools, including local ones, and have come to the conclusion that this industry still has a long way to go in terms of feature coverage, speed of adaptation to new needs, scalability, security, and also the cost of ownership. At the same time, the demand for local services will grow, and this is a good opportunity for our operators to improve the variety and quality of their services.

In addition, there is a great need for solutions withopen source, with less complex features to develop: instability causes high uncertainty, so it is important to minimize costly unpredictable actions and make changes in short steps with clear, understandable and controllable results.

Finding a balance

There are worthy examples on the Russian marketcompanies that independently develop digital solutions. At Rolf, all CRM and ERP systems have been developed for over 20 years, and currently about 60 full-time programmers are working on them. Such companies will be able to create boxed solutions and enrich the market with new products. With the advent of a new era of Agile, all platforms are moving into PaaS and SaaS level container clouds. In addition, database security is still the most important issue for systems with financial transactions. It is important to use mature, secure, sustainable solutions at this level.

PaaS, Platform as a Service— a model for providing cloud computing, withwhich the consumer gets access to the use of information technology platforms: operating systems, database management systems, middleware, development and testing tools hosted by the provider.

The specifics of the implementation of highload projects in the currentconditions also in the fact that it is important to quickly replace working tools with local ones in the absence of valid data on their stability. It's like trying to switch a car engine at full speed.

Therefore, first of all, the developmenthigh-load systems today requires a competent and realistic investment project: there should be no illusions that the creation of a worthwhile product is possible in a short time. In addition, in order to test new company ideas, it is important to have a mature platform on which all cloud processes are implemented and used, such as CI / CD, DevOps, automation. Migrating to the cloud for high-load projects is not an easy journey, but it is necessary in order to test any idea in the shortest possible time and with minimal effort.

Any company that wants to conductcompetitive business must find the right balance between cloud services and local infrastructure in its field of activity. Each business has its own dynamics, in our case, a hybrid solution using both the tools of cloud providers and our own local infrastructure became more logical to ensure the best quality of customer service. 

Collaboration is the key to solving the problem

Now the implementation of highload projects is no longerjust the responsibility of the developers, but the task of the business as a whole, which is why it is so important to build partnerships between different blocks and departments of the company, including marketing, business planning, HR. In the future, such interdisciplinary projects can be transformed into an open platform for discussing topical issues in the implementation of highload projects.

Now there is no time to create an ideal structure - it is important to quickly rebuild and adapt to current needs.

Now is the time to collaborate, createcommunities: instead of looking for a solution to a problem individually, it makes sense to offer options that different companies can use. We should contribute more to open source projects and prepare mature and stable alternatives to commercial software that is critical to our business.

It's time to act, now there's no time forcreating an ideal structure - it is important to quickly rebuild and adapt to current needs. It is no longer possible to create a strategy for five years ahead, everything is changing too quickly, and the best thing that can be done now is to change with the world.

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