Infrastructure and data platform services of Russia’s Yandex Cloud helped miner Nornickel accelerate the development of products for mining and geological modelling, the companies announced.
Nornickel previously used in-house servers for these purposes, and the switch to Yandex Cloud helped accelerate some processes by 18%, the company said.
“In the global market, the digital development of industrial majors has long been intertwined with cloud technologies. I am confident that strong local cloud players and great demand for new digital solutions from industry players will also foster technological alliances between them and, consequently, accelerate market-wide development. The first steps have been taken,” Alexander Chernikov, Yandex Cloud’s Chief Revenue Officer, said.
Nornickel’s DevOps engineers found it easy to migrate and manage services in the cloud environment, Aleksey Manikhin, Head of IT Strategy and Development at Nornickel, said.
“They can handle many tasks on their own, without involving the service provider,” he added.
Yandex Cloud helps Nornickel not only with its internal needs, but also with products for the Russian government-backed project, Metallurgy Industrial Competence Centre (ICC). Nornicke l is working on the Mining and Geological Information System, the Mining Operations Planning AMS and the Underground Mining Control within the framework of this ICC.
The migration to cloud services has helped propel many processes, Nornickel said. Allocation of in-house capacity and setting up servers for a project, which used to take up to 10 days, can now be completed within just one day in the cloud infrastructure. Creation of a machine-learning model, developing and testing software internally could previously take as long as a month, but now it takes just 15–16 days, depending on the complexity of a task.
Nornickel is also exploring opportunities offered by language models and big data mining, and is planning to use DevSecOps platform to integrate security testing into software development.