Uklon

IT-infrastructure is a gear for every business. In this case study, we will explain why the product IT company Uklon transitioned from its own hardware and dedicated servers to cloud services.

Uklon is a Ukrainian-owned company, as well as the ride hailing service of the same name and apps to use it. The service started its operation in 2010. The company name is short for Ukraine online ― an internet portal where a first ride was requested that very day. The company works in 27 Ukrainian cities, and also in Uzbekistan.

IT products ecosystem

Uklon isn’t just a ride hailing service. Now, the company employs over 700 experts, 250 of which are on the IT department. The company has 11 innovative products in it portfolio, which are built on a microservice architecture with the use of cloud technologies. It is worth mentioning that Uklon has its own R&D department, cartographic service, and is actively utilizing artificial intelligence.

The company’s IT infrastructure is divided into two parts:

• External services. These are the product solutions to be used by clients.
• Internal services. They are responsible for the operating activity of the company. These are databases, terminal servers, cataloging services for user credentials, code repositories, services for monitoring and automating business processes, etc.

While Uklon’s external services have been running on AWS for quite some time, internal services have over the years been hosted on their local servers. However, later physical servers were disposed of, as the team started working remotely. Because of this, there were issues with the hardware maintenance and increase in the time of connecting the team to the necessary programs. For that reason, internal services were transferred to dedicated servers of a foreign data center.

«All dedicated servers were combined into one network, but it was impossible to build a fault-tolerant IT infrastructure as the data center did not provide the necessary equipment,» says Taras Bilichak, Uklon Internal IT Infrastructure Lead. «Moreover, there were cases of services outages, which in general had a negative impact on the company’s work.»

Uklon specialists had the goal of increasing the fault tolerance of services, implementing a BCP plan and successfully completing an audit according to ISO standards. Therefore, it was decided to switch from the current data center.

Resilience is above it all

For Uklon specialists, it was important that the future service provider was able to meet the requirements for fault tolerance and reliability of the IT infrastructure.

Secondly, the price was no less critical. It wasn’t supposed to be significantly higher than the price for dedicated servers. Thirdly, the geographical location of the data center. Most of the team is based in Ukraine, so low ping was a priority. But at the same time, in order to reduce the risks, it was necessary to keep it outside of Ukraine.

«We cannot afford any downtime,» says Taras Bilichak, Internal IT Infrastructure Lead at Uklon. «Idle IT infrastructure is not only a loss of productivity, but also means possible financial losses, for example, due to fines for delays in reporting.»

As a result, they decided to migrate to the GigaCloud cloud in Warsaw. All internal services of the Uklon company were deployed in the public cloud on VMware.

Additionally, Uklon backs up data using a special BaaS cloud service. Each of the company’s IT services has its own policies for storing backup copies, and with regard to them, experts make partial or full backups. Backups are stored in the GigaCloud repository and some in AWS to prevent a single point of failure.

Multicloud approach

Now, all the company’s services, external as well as internal ones, are hosted in the clouds, of AWS and GigaCloud. The company doesn’t have its own servers.

Taras Bilichak points out a couple advantages of hosting in the cloud compared to dedicated servers.

First, it is an opportunity to delegate maintenance and support of IT equipment to the cloud operator specialists. Secondly, the delay and the number of complaints about the operation of services from users decreased. Third, there is an opportunity to get 24/7 technical support from cloud operator specialists, which was not an option with the dedicated server provider.

«We really appreciate the diligence of the GigaCloud support’s response and assistance,» says Taras Bilichak, Internal IT Infrastructure Lead at Uklon. «Compared to the cloud and the dedicated servers we used before, GigaCloud comes out ahead without a doubt.»