Ozon rents servers in Israel, Serbia, China and the United Arab Emirates

According to Kontur.Zakupki’s materials, the list of countries also includes Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia, where the company already delivers products. In the countries included in the list – Israel, Turkey, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, mainland China and Hong Kong – the marketplace has not officially announced its operation.

It is planned to rent 8 servers in each country, 6 in China and 2 in Hong Kong.

As it appears from the procurement materials, the target server configuration is: Intel Xeon E-2288G 8C/16T 3.7 GHz / 64 GB / 2x 480 GB SSD / Ubuntu 22.04, Internet 1 GB. For foreign countries a reduction via Internet to 100 MB is possible.

The company had previously announced its intention to rent servers in 14 CIS countries and 70 cities in Russia, but countries outside the CIS were not included in the lists.

At the time of this publication, Ozon did not respond to RB.RU’s request regarding its plans to rent server equipment. The tender has already concluded and its results are closed.

LEVL 7 LLC CEO Denis Kuzmichev told RB.RU that decentralization of server clusters is necessary to increase the stability of the entire system.

“If the marketplace stores all its capacity and data in one data center, then in the event of a technical or man-made disaster, or a hacker attack on the data center, the entire project will be at risk. Using a group of separate data centers and renting servers in different jurisdictions is a common practice for large companies and projects. A good example is the decentralization of servers at Telegram,” Kuzmichev said.

According to the expert, this step, on the one hand, increases the project’s survivability and data security, and on the other hand, entails additional difficulties and costs. The company must take into account local legislation, organize the work of teams of specialists abroad and, at the very least, take into account distances when exchanging data.

The expert noted that the specified configuration is a workhorse for a computing node; for example, it can be used to deploy and maintain a microservice within a marketplace site.

“The single-processor solution, fast but very small disks and minimal parameters of the rest of the configuration tell us that the machine will most likely be used to process user events or simple calculations within the market. To store order data, for example, a more powerful cluster of machines is needed,” the expert explained.

Renting a server with an average configuration will cost from 100 thousand rubles per year. Kuzmichev added that the market does not rent servers individually, but rents them in racks and in groups at once.

“In addition to the obvious benefits of paying for a bulk order, this allows you to customize network settings and set operating parameters for an entire rack at once, making administration and security easier. For particularly large projects, entire data centers are sometimes built or rented, sometimes for a project at the level of, for example, VKontakte,” the specialist added.

LEVL 7 believes that a project owner, when deciding to deploy a cluster of its servers in a foreign jurisdiction, always balances the security of the project against the potential risks and costs of such a decision.

Experts consider the main dangers to be:

• legal problems, since servers can be arrested, the court can impose a ban on use;
• fines and obligations to comply with local legislation, for example, a foreign team of specialists supporting the operation of data centers and servers may be compromised;
• overhead and incidental costs of using a remote offshore server farm, including, but not limited to, transaction risks and costs of making payments to offshore banks.