Cloud Technologies as a Current Need of Big Business

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andrushko Cloud Technologies as a Current Need of Big Business

Dmitriy Andrushko, Principal Software Engineer, Mirantis, talks about cloud technologies, global leaders and up-to-date needs of global business.

– Dmitriy, could you tell me about specifics and focus of the company Mirantis?

First of all, we are a technological company. We have got a set of solutions and products for creating private clouds. This is the first peculiarity of our company. The second one is that we work with open source technologies and solutions. It means almost everything we do we share with the community and put into open repositories. There are some exclusions, but they concern only specific elaborations for particular customers, whose cases include know-hows or intellectual property. Outcomes of the most other service companies are not seen. Of course, they speak and write about their experience. But what they certainly do, and how it works, are issues to discuss. Due to the open source strategy, you can see a wide range of Mirantis’ works, try them out and even add your code into relevant projects. Since Mirantis is one of the established leaders in the cloud technology segment, we have well-known global customers and competitors.

 

Our expertise is much needed in almost all vertical markets – Fintech, Telco, Enterprise, Energy, Transportation. So we work with any companies that have got a task of creating and maintaining a private cloud infrastructure. By nature these are large enough organizations that can afford themselves to maintain their own data-centre where infrastructure is to deployed.

 

– At some companies, I was told that programmers should often cope with some narrow-focused things that their clients work with. As instance, in the case of Fintech they have to be competent in financial market operations. Is it also true for Mirantis?

 

We work at the lower level of platform and infrastructure building. Our task is to provide a platform for some applications to work. Regarding Fintech we have a set of specific restrictions, for example, compliance with standard PCI DSS. And we’ve got a great many restrictions of the kind – security, robustness, and accessibility of our products. These are the aspects of major influence on the infrastructure that we develop in Fintech sphere. The fundamental demand is security. And our services must meet all the demands of security.

 

– Do you mean the working process of bank’s staff or their inner communication?

Usually, we don’t know what apps our clients use. Generally, we need only use-case, that is what kind of task would be solved via our platform. However, we scrupulously analyze demands for the infrastructure and the platform, on which base our clients’ corporate applications are deployed. As instance, for one of the American banks, that I have already mentioned, we built an integrated cloud in 16 data-centres on the USA territory. And then our customer deployed the apps needed at the certain locations.

 

 

  • What other Mirantis Fintech cases can you tell about?

 

 

We’ve got a few clients from banking and financial sectors. These are large financial institutions at the global level. They often come to us with similar cases – deploying apps in a cloud. Cloud infrastructures by Mirantis allow them to bring down operational costs and rich so-called agile operations (quickly and flexibly deploying apps and services according to business processes and current needs).  

 

– Could you give some more examples when companies need such a cloud infrastructure?

 

Some time ago we performed a big project connected with shifting one prominent payment system into our cloud platform. In the USA almost everyone knows about Black Friday – a time of Christmas purchases and oversells. From Black Friday till Christmas the number of payments exponentially grows. And then everything subsides and returns to ordinary rates. During these two or three weeks, our customer needs much more computing resources for payment processing. To my mind, you can solve the task (enhancing the amount of resources for a certain period and then reducing it) through cloud infrastructure only.

We had built a cloud platform where our customer deployed applications. It’s important for such a cloud infrastructure to be able of adjusting its performance according to the load demand. So if it’s needed, apps launched in the infrastructure can scale using additional resources and provide customers with continuous service. When requests start declining the excessive resources may be disengaged, and part of equipment gets off.

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