The cloud platform Yandex Cloud announced plans to increase investments in the development of existing and the creation of new services and technologies. Over the course of two years, from 2025 to 2026, 42 billion rubles will be allocated for these purposes, which is almost double the costs in 2023–2024, amounting to 22 billion rubles.
Image source: Yandex Cloud
The growth in investments is associated with the high pace of development of the platform, an increase in the number of users and an expansion of the list of priority areas, which included AI services, services for information security management and tools for ensuring the full development cycle.
One of the new areas of Yandex Cloud is services for working with AI technologies. The AI Studio platform, presented today as part of Yandex Scale 2024, allows you to create applications based on various Yandex AI technologies within a single interface: YandexGPT and YandexART networks, speech recognition and synthesis technologies, etc. The platform includes an SDK with ready-made code samples that will allow customers to speed up the development process.
Also available in the platform is AI Playground, a service for testing ML models in dialog mode, which allows you to select the optimal prompts and model settings for your projects. In the future, AI Playground will offer other ML technologies, including Yandex SpeechKit models for speech synthesis and recognition. The platform, already available to all Yandex Cloud clients, will be expanded with new features in the future. The company also plans to share its own practices in implementing AI to help customers quickly benefit from its use.
The second area of investment is strengthening information security. Yandex Cloud will develop existing solutions in this area, such as services for protection against DDoS attacks, as well as create new ones. Thus, a single “dashboard” Security Deck was presented, which allows you to manage the security of the cloud infrastructure and monitor key parameters. With its help, you can identify vulnerabilities, track sensitive data, and manage employee access rights to reduce the risk of leaks from the cloud. Security Desk testing is free – just submit an application on the website.
Security Deck brings together several security management tools. For example, the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) module is designed to identify personal and other sensitive data in the infrastructure. It determines the storage locations for various types of confidential information (for example, full name or SNILS), which reduces the risk of their leakage. And using the Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) module, you can check access rights to cloud resources.
There is also a module for controlling the transparency of access to cloud resources, Access Transparency. It allows you to check for what purposes cloud platform employees were granted access to the infrastructure – for example, to perform additional diagnostics of IT systems by support engineers or to update software. The built-in YandexGPT neural network summarizes the collected information and provides it in a convenient form.
Another direction is a full-cycle platform for the development and maintenance of SourceCraft IT products. On this platform it will be possible to create source code, manage its versions, test, build, deploy and maintain software. In addition to tools for storing and reviewing code, SourceCraft will add functions for continuous integration and deployment of IT projects, secure development, auditing, logging, monitoring and tracing.
The first component of the platform will be the previously presented Yandex Code Assistant service – an AI assistant for working with code. With its help, it will be possible to generate the most likely continuation of a code fragment. The service is already available for testing on the Yandex Cloud platform. The company will provide access to SourceCraft to external users in 2025, but you can sign up for a waiting list now.
Also at the conference, it was announced the launch of the Yandex BareMetal service for renting dedicated physical servers and the Serverless Integrations service to speed up product development in the cloud. Yandex BareMetal will allow companies to obtain computing power to host any software, including virtualization tools. In this case, the company undertakes maintenance of the equipment.
Yandex BareMetal can be used together with the rest of the Yandex Cloud cloud infrastructure. Clients will be able to select the required server configuration in a special console, as well as use a single support center, billing and the provider’s access control system. Applications for free closed testing of Yandex BareMetal, which will begin before the end of 2024, can be submitted now.
In turn, the Serverless Integrations service will allow IT specialists to automate work processes without writing code, for example, processing online orders and monitoring security systems, which, according to the company, can speed up application development by 10–70%, depending on the tasks and specifics of the company. Serverless Integrations is available to Yandex Cloud users upon request.
The Workflows tool will help you connect workflows with each other. It is enough to describe the sequence of operations step by step using markup, and at the right moment Workflows itself will launch these processes and monitor their execution. In the future, Workflows will have a visual interface, with the help of which a sequence of processes can be compiled from blocks, like in a designer. To automate processes, there is also an EventRouter – a tool for exchanging information between internal services about new events in the system.