Clever Geek Handbook

4 years of samurai journey. How not to get stuck, but enter IT history

In 4 years you can finish your undergraduate studies, learn a language, learn a new specialty, gain experience in a new field, and travel to dozens of cities and countries. And you can 4 years in ten and all in one bottle. No magic, just business is your business.



4 years ago, we became part of the IT industry and found ourselves connected with it by one goal, shackled by one chain. Birthday is the best time to talk about your path, while remembering how the calendar of the industry itself turned over. In this post, everything will be like on a real holiday: memories, beer, burgers, friends, tales. We invite you to our virtual retrospective party.







The end of July 2015





At this time, one not-so-large team of IT specialists knew that a supernova would break out in the hosting hosting universe of Russia.



â–Ť Supernova explosion



The RUVDS blog on Habré has almost 800 publications, but few people know who is doing this project. We, the former team of algorithmic traders, began to develop RUVDS virtual server hosting in July 2015.



There were several reasons for this. The main thing is that the turnover of our market began to decline catastrophically under the yoke of sanctions and the current unfavorable situation for foreign investors. The niche that we occupied in the field of algorithmic trading at one point was actually overwhelmed by us. For individual instruments, every second transaction was carried out with us, and these were one of the most liquid derivatives and securities of our market. Another reason was that customers began to grow smaller: teams like ours managed the capital of small commercial banks, which began to rapidly lose their licenses. Hence the impossibility of increasing capital under management and entering a fundamentally different size of business.



The low turnover of our market and a small number of players is the main reason why other algorithmic teams and funds could not overcome the development stage and grow into large funds, like Knight Capital abroad.



And what did we have? The accumulated knowledge and experience in creating highly loaded systems and high-speed infrastructure - all this turned out to be in demand on the IAAS services market. Understanding perfectly the needs of traders, we first of all created an infrastructure that we ourselves would use. As a result, the first customers of the company were brokers and their clients-traders BCS, Finam, National Settlement Depository (Moscow Exchange).



When creating a hosting, we used the automation skills and experience of our team. Indeed, algorithmic trading is a rather difficult task, which accustoms to the strictest discipline, maximum coherence in a small team and unhealthy perfectionism in relation to the result. This is the key to success, perhaps, for all start-up companies.



July 27, 2015 MT Finance LLC was registered. The first investments in the project were servers from a fleet of equipment designed for low-latency trading. The office was located where traders were sitting. Subsequently, traders became less and less and now only a few Bloomberg keyboards remind us of this stage of the development of our team.









Nikita Tsaplin in the first office of the company with the same keyboard



December 2015





â–ŤStarting your own data center in Moscow, in Korolev



Another habit with algorithmic trading is building your own infrastructure from and to. Algotorging is full of paranoia: what if the algorithm is stolen, and suddenly the alien channel will be slower - after all, money is at stake. In the cloud business, we decided not to change this habit, because the data became the new currency for us, and resolutely decided on building our own DC. For a long time we were looking for a site that could satisfy the needs of energy supply and communications, as well as general reliability - as a result, we stopped at the site of one of the strategic plants in our country, which was able to offer the best conditions. Taking into account that reliability is of primary importance in the data center, we invited an experienced team from MTW.RU to cooperate. Her experts have provided invaluable assistance in the construction of the data center. As a result, this allowed us to build a data center in the shortest possible time with high quality, given MTW.RU's many years of experience.









The room of the data center is located in a bomb shelter on the territory of the enterprise Composite JSC. This object is also interesting in that it is a complex of several independent rooms (pressurized rooms), the premises of which are airtight. This increases the fault tolerance of the data center, and also allows a more flexible approach to the implementation of individual customer requests in terms of security and reliability.



→ Report for geek porn lovers









Today RUVDS has at its disposal its own data center located at the following address: Moscow Region, Korolev, ul. Pionerskaya, d. 4. The premises of the data center are certified in accordance with the requirements of the FSTEC, were designed in accordance with the reliability category TIER III, according to the standard TIA-942 (redundancy N + 1 with a fault tolerance level of 99.98%). The data center area is about 1500 sq.m. Part of it is occupied by the control room, domestic premises, diesel generators and other systems. The available reserves allow you to quickly increase the data center area and the supplied power supply by at least twice.



â–Ť December 2015 - launch of the ruvds.com service



When creating a service in order not to depend on other people's developments, we also decided to go our own way. The self-written implementation of the service core allowed us to acquire a set of advantages in comparison with competitors. First of all, it is security and full control over each script: we know what and how it works, we see all the internal sides of the project and we can quickly introduce innovations.



The first version of the site was written in PHP, but it did not last long - because of fast-growing loads, I had to switch to C #. Several teams of developers participated in creating the site at different time periods.



The site design has not changed much since the first day of launch - sometimes we make small changes, but in general our audience is rather conservative and we try not to make big changes on the site.



2016





▍ March 25, 2016 started blogging on Habré



The first post was more like a press release, and further publications - like awkward marketing moves. But years passed, we evolved and today our blog is in first place among all the blogs of Habré companies.



Airat Zaripov, a former trader and physicist, took up the setup of the corporate blog - thanks to his work, you know the blog as it is now. The recipe is simple: as soon as we ceased to regard Habr exclusively as a channel for attracting customers, we were able to make a truly popular and fascinating blog. Today, Habr is for us a key platform for interacting with our audience, and for sales we have concentrated on other channels - we, of course, will not talk about them.



In 2018, they entered the top twenty largest providers of IaaS services, according to the rating CNews Analytics: the largest suppliers of IaaS in Russia in 2018.


In March 2016, we launched our own partnership program , at the same time we became the technological partner of the international IT giant Huawei . Choosing hardware for our service, we initially made a choice in favor of what we had to work with before - Supermicro server platforms, which were manually equipped with the necessary content by our admins (in the best traditions of high-frequency). At some point, we were faced with the fact that with increasing volumes, one or the other part ended, and as a result, the equipment fleet became motley. We realized that under our requirements we need to order servers from China. Choosing a vendor, we were guided by the opinion of Oscard Wilde and simply chose the best - Huawei.



* * *





â–Ť We, too



June 2016 - the first 10,000 virtual servers were created on the RUVDS website. In honor of this event, we released mugs, some of which are still in service at our office :) It is curious, but the tradition of producing mugs on memorable dates began with Nicholas II.









Friendship with Huawei became more and more close, so June 24, 2016 RUVDS together with Huawei held the first thematic forum "Cloud Technologies in Russia" (CloudRussia), a photo of which can be viewed here .



In August 2016, we finally started selling Linux-based VPS. Become the first in the VPS market who started selling virtual machines at a price of 65 rubles a month - at that time it was the best offer, it was cheaper to only take web hosting. And already in September we made it possible to install Linux OS images with the ISPmanager 5 Lite control panel.



* * *





In general, strangely enough, the end of 2016 (and the beginning of 2017) turned out to be not very rich in bright events, but there were enough stories, especially related to security. For example, on December 1, 2016, more than a million Google accounts were hacked. The Gooligan virus turned out to be all the fault, which could steal email addresses and authentication data, gain access to Gmail, Google Docs, photos and other services of the company.





* * *



At the end of 2016, our marketing department asked the question “How to surprise customers.” There was a crazy idea - instead of champagne and tangerines, to offer something more original. We stopped at the craft, because it was just becoming a new trend in the beer industry. Since among our friends there were notable Beer Bros brewers, we only have to agree on a small batch with our own label design. The name was invented almost immediately: " Dark Admin " to attract the target audience to the drink. And the first toast to the localhost without clinking glasses.







After the new year, we received good feedback from customers on gifts and decided that our own labels were not enough for us, we needed our own beer. In February, when there was still snowing on the street, our team arrived at the factory: we got slippers, caps, gloves and went to brew beer. The process is actually boring, fun for about 30 minutes - when you can taste different malt, and then you need to grind it, carry heavy bags up the stairs, throw them into the cooking pot and wait for several hours when the wort boils.









As a result, the “admin” beer was brewed - in the spring, when it had time to ferment, the first ton of the finished foamy drink stood in a barrel and was waiting for its draft hour. But what to do with such a volume? Give customers so much, drink for yourself? It is problematic, therefore, they decided to help the plant a bit, which at that time had an agreement with several bars, through which they decided to start the first steps. We held several presentations and free tastings, but it didn’t help much in sales.



Is it a coincidence, but next to the company’s office, the Burger Heroes restaurant opened, in which it was possible to meet the owner, Igor Podstreshny, by chance. He took with interest the idea of ​​attracting a geek audience to his institution with admin beer.



An article was published on Habré about the development of design for foam bottles, in which we invited everyone to a free tasting. Wishing to gather enough, the owner of the Burger Heroes Habr audience liked - so the idea was born to equip a specialty beer with a specialty burger for geeks. For us, this has become a new offline gastronomic experiment and an opportunity to attract a wide audience of the restaurant.



2017





And in February we launched a new airside in Switzerland, in Attinghausen ( report ). We chose DC in the picture and did not lose. The former military bunker corresponded to the company's commitment to reliability, and Jason Bourne himself would have envied the security systems used at the facility. The first servers to Switzerland were taken by train (so as not to shock) from Moscow to Strasbourg, from there through the Alps in the trunk of a rented car.









* * *





And we, in order not to waste time, acquired new important partners. Only for May 2017:



  1. With the support of an insurance broker, Pure Insurance insured its liability to customers for unauthorized public disclosure of personal data and corporate information in one of the largest insurance companies in the world - AIG. Then scandals with leaks of personal data have not yet erupted and even AIG themselves looked at us as idiots. Another habit of algorithmic trading is to try to predict risks. A good trader is primarily a risk manager, therefore security issues in the cloud business are number 1 for us.
  2. We made friends with Kaspersky Lab and became the first provider to offer its customers antivirus protection for virtual servers running Windows Server - Kaspersky Security for Virtualization Light Agent (a lightweight agent for virtual environments).
  3. Together with HUAWEI and Kaspersky Lab, they held a forum called “ Joint Security of Cloud Solutions for Business ”, where they discussed all the paranoia and real risks of data storage in the cloud.


* * *



June 2017 was marked by two important events that rattled across all technology blogs:





We went our own war - for reliability, stability and a little ... for seven feet under the keel.



In June 2017, the RUVDS data center in Korolyov passed certification for compliance with the requirements of the FSTEC of Russia. Rucloud data center is designed in accordance with TIER III reliability category according to TIA-942 standard (N + 1 redundancy with 99.98% fault tolerance).



Having worked hard in May, in the summer we organized a competition for our partners, the main prize in which was participation in the regatta on the Moscow River in the same boat with our team. Already in August, the winner of the competition took part with us in the Regatta Media CUP (on class J / 70 yachts) on the basis of the Royal Yacht Club yacht club. Then, among 70 participants, our team took 4th place.









The event was remembered by vivid emotions and positive, so it was decided to return to the sail later and already in the big water.



* * *





In November 2017, we translated our service into English and German to make it easier to find a common language with customers from Europe.





* * *



At the end of the year, it was decided to continue the alcohol experiments - after receiving a lot of good reviews about DarkAdmin and gaining experience, we cooked a new light light ale for admins, called SmartAdmin. The new beer was also enjoyed by a wide audience and received high marks on Untappd . The commercial component then did not interest us - it was a product for friends from friends. And for the third year this beer has been popular, it can still be found in many craft bars in Moscow.









2018





For us, 2018 was the year of collaborations and competitions.



â–ŤSpring 2018. Habraburger









We decided to return to a gastronomic hobby in a collaboration with Burger Heroes. The process of developing a burger was not fast - almost an year has passed from the idea to the launch in production. At the end of 2017, we held a contest for the best burger recipe and arranged a vote on Habré. Based on the proposed recipes, the cooks of Burger Heroes prepared a burger, which they called a Habraburger (hungry not to read!).







In the spring of 2018, together with Habr, they held a Geektimes-seminar : how to talk about technologies and gadgets is simple and clear. Naturally, there were some Hubraburgers and the brand Smart Admin.









â–ŤMay 2018. 12 years of Habr and Coin for happiness



At the 12th anniversary of Habr, awarding the best blogs of companies and the best authors of Habr - Habr Awards. In the nomination "Best blog on Habré" our blog took an honorable second place, overtaking Mail.ru Group and stepping on the heels of JUG.ru Group.









We were one of the sponsors of the event and then invited the still unknown singer Monetochka. And as you know, Habr made many people famous. The coin was no exception - her star rose immediately after the corporate party :)









On August 23, together with Habr, they held another seminar, “How to motivate the author if he is a programmer” - more than 80 people attended the event, among whom were representatives of the largest players in the Russian IT market: Headhunter, Technoserv, Tutu.ru, LANIT and others.



â–ŤAugust 2018. Server in the clouds (real)



Summer, heat, irresistible desire for action. We decided to add a literal meaning to the phrase “cloud server” and organized a contest “ Server in the clouds ” with the launch of a piece of iron in the sky in a balloon. The competition was as follows: on a special landing it was necessary to answer several questions about virtual servers and put on the map the point of the ball’s intended landing. The main prize of the competition was participation in the Mediterranean regatta - 512 users of Habr came to try their luck, and the launch posts received a total of more than 40 thousand views.



By the way, the company's system administrators then outplayed the scientific component of the project - it was interesting to find out how the server will behave in the air, whether it will communicate with it and how it will work in non-standard conditions. For this, several communication systems were connected to the server, and a ground-based flight control center was built. Later, this story grew into a more serious project and reached new heights, but more on that later.



â–Ť November 2018. Aegean Regatta



From November 3 to 10, 2018, the RUVDS and Habra team took part in a sailing regatta in the Aegean Sea - yes, in the continuation of the same regatta in 2017 in small boats. In total, more than 400 people took part in the regatta on 45 yachts of different classes - among them were both clients of the hosting provider and just representatives of large IT companies.















Despite the fact that the majority of our team members were newcomers and took part in sailing for the first time, well-coordinated work allowed the RUVDS team to enter the top 10 finalists.









→ Cool post about regatta



â–ŤNew RUVDS services in 2018



So that you don’t think that instead of working, we only drink beer, eat burgers, drive on yachts and run the server in a balloon (is this not a dream job ??!)), Here are a few “working moments” that tumbled like in 2018 from the cornucopia:





At the end of 2018, RUVDS was among the twenty largest providers of IAAS services (according to the CNews Analytics: Largest IaaS Providers in Russia 2018 rating).


Also at the end of 2018, they moved from the old data center in Switzerland to Zurich. The move was forced - a private investor looked after a bunker with a super-clever data center and bought it, apparently, to store the crypt (almost on the eve of the collapse of many altcoins)). The move began with a gradual shutdown of the equipment at 00:00 on November 10th. All work was completed already at 04:30 - in 4.5 hours everything was carefully disconnected, taken out of the data center, loaded into transport, transported along beautiful Swiss roads to a new place and assembled / connected there. Everything went twice as fast as planned, and even without a single glitch - like in a Swiss watch. You can read about the DC in Zurich here , and about the move itself here .



â–Ť December 2018, Game Overnight. Old school gaming



Since childhood, we know from the proverb that business is time, and fun - at least a couple of hours is needed. Therefore, together with the Museum of Soviet gaming machines, we decided to hold the first tournament in Russia on old-school video games. It so happened that in terms of the number of participants this was our largest project - 10 thousand people took part in 2 stages of the tournament. More than 400 people came to the museum finals, 80 of which reached the final games. Sergey Mezentsev (from the Reutov TV duet) in the guise of DJ Ogurez, the sea of ​​SmartAdmin and our new project - a Super Mario burger developed for the event (second collaboration with BH).









→ Slot machines: where did they come from in the USSR and how are they arranged

→ Photo report from Game Overnight



â–ŤSteping into the new year ...



How could so many things be done? And that’s not all - there was still a calendar, photos from which, on Friday’s rights, are here .











2019



We do not know what 2019 will be for the industry. Maybe the main event will be the closure of Google+ on April 2, 2019, or maybe numerous leakage of personal data, or maybe the law on an autonomous Runet. It is possible that the main event has not yet occurred.



Our business is to work with technology and provide clients with the required professional services, regardless of market conditions, politics and economics.



So, in 2019, we opened 4 new pressure zones in Russia and in the world:



  1. February - in St. Petersburg ( Linxdatacenter )
  2. March - in Kazan ( IT-Park )
  3. May - in Frankfurt ( Telehouse )
  4. June - in Yekaterinburg ( Data Center Yekaterinburg )


In total, RUVDS now has 8 sites in the world: its own TIER III level data center in Korolyov and hermetic zones in the data centers Interxion ZUR1 (Switzerland), Equinix LD8 (London), MMTS-9 (Moscow) and other cities. All data centers meet a reliability level of at least TIER III.









Cloudrussia Interactive Course , Huawei. , Open Lab Moscow 90 2 .



▍12 2019. « »



If we pumped the regatta along the Moscow River to the Aegean, then why not pump the "Server in the Clouds"? So we thought, and decided to continue experimenting with servers off the ground. The first flight proved that the idea of ​​“air-based servers” is not as crazy as it might seem, so we decided to raise the bar and step towards the “space data center”: to check the operation of the server, which will rise to a height of about 30 km on the stratosphere — into the stratosphere. The launch was timed to the Cosmonautics Day.



On April 12, our small server successfully flew into the stratosphere! During the flight, the server aboard the stratospheric balloon distributed the Internet, shot / transmitted video and telemetry data to the ground.



In a nutshell: on the landing pageit was possible to send text messages to the server through the form; they were transferred via HTTP protocol through 2 independent satellite communication systems to a computer suspended under a stratospheric balloon, and it transmitted this data back to Earth, but not in the same way via satellite, but via radio. Thus, we understood that the server generally receives data, and that it can distribute the Internet from the stratosphere. At the same landing, the flight path of the stratostat with the marks of receipt of each message was displayed - it was possible to track the route and the height of the “transcendental server” in real time.











By the way, in all this movement there was also competitive mechanics - it was necessary to guess the place of landing of the stratospheric balloon. To the winner - a trip to the Baikonur Cosmodrome to launch the Soyuz MS-13 rocket. The winner is the well-known vvzvlad , who recently published a gorgeous photo report from a trip on our blog



image



: We’ll open the maps: we plan to develop the Stratonet project further, complicate the task, and work on various ideas. For example, is it possible for us to organize a high-speed laser communication between two stratostats to use them as repeaters. And also start the server on the satellite and see how the memesics will be hosted on the space data center ... :)



2019 CNews Analytics IaaS . RUVDS 16 , 3 .


At the end of summer 2019, our technical support service began to learn Chinese. And all because we were the first of the hosting providers to launch VPS with a price of 30 rubles - it’s cheaper not to come up with it, if only for free. This tariff has become a real alternative to web hosting and all virtual servers on it have been purchased in less than a day. The next delivery took place after 2 weeks - we bought 2 times more equipment, but this was not enough - the virtual machines were bought in a few hours. The tariff has become extremely popular not only in Russia but also abroad - and it is precisely here that the Chinese have succeeded here. At the moment, the tariff is available only on pre-order - the queue is like for iPhones in the best of times, but it moves :) They say that someone even sells places in it (not us).



â–Ť Era Levelord and Ko



Back in 2019, we happened to meet the legendary game designers and developers of computer games, interviews with which can be found here:





Levellord became a friend of the company and even wrote two publications on our blog. In June 2019, the winner of the company's competition won a dinner with a game designer, and in October, Richard starred in our advertisement (where would it be without it). Habr readers see these creations first:









* * *



Since April 2019, we have radically changed the work of technical support. In addition to the new, fully customized ticket system, we increased the staff of all support levels, refused to outsource the first line and switched to the most honest 24/7. Call at night, do not let the guys sleep :) Such changes have reduced the processing time and response time for incoming messages at times.



In August 2019, the ability to configure a firewall was added - the “Configure Firewall” button is located next to the IP address of your server in your personal account.



In September 2019, for virtual servers on Linux, it became possible to select images with preinstalled Plesk and cPanel control panels. Panels are great for novice users, more than 80% of sites in the world are already working under their control.

When you purchase a new server, you can get the Plesk panel for free until the end of the year. CPanel panel is also provided free of charge for the first 2 weeks of the server, then you can purchase a license yourself.



Also, from September on RUVDS it became possible to connect video cards to rented virtual servers. A video card on VPS - the same as on a home computer, will allow you to run any application in the familiar desktop interface, solve various tasks that require serious computing power: performance and video memory bandwidth. A server with a video card is available for order in the RUCLOUD data center with a processor frequency of 3.4 GHz.



In October, in order to provide customers with the ability to monitor and manage their servers from mobile devices, we released the RUVDS mobile application for Android OS (for iOS - soon).



Recently, in connection with the reorganization of the support work, there was a need for a large openspace-space, as a result of which we moved to a new office with ping-pong and drawings on the walls :) The design of the office is still in progress, but for now a few photos:







Well, then was November 2019 - we are writing this post, 777th in a row. And we are slowly getting ready to take stock of the year, as it was in 2017 and 2018 - in 2019, too, there is something to tell.



Come to us to work, follow our blog on Habré, use RUVDS services. We make our story only with you. Only for you.


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