Yandex.Cloud platform architecture

Yandex.Cloud is natively designed to provide a single pool of unified hardware resources. Yandex.Cloud has no dedicated physical management servers, and many platform services are deployed on virtual machines similar to end-user VMs.

This approach ensures easy scalability of the platform: at minimal cost, you can automatically add infrastructure capacity ranging from a single server to an entire data center running thousands of machines.

The Yandex.Cloud architecture looks as follows:

The Storage Layer is at the core of Yandex.Cloud. This enables storage of data and system information for all Yandex.Cloud services. The Storage Layer uses the Yandex native DBMS Yandex Database (YDB): it provides for the secure and efficient storage of data, accommodates heavy data loads, and horizontal scaling as Yandex.Cloud grows. The dedicated replication mechanism of YDB covers all the hardware storage capacities used by Yandex.Cloud.

Yandex Compute Cloud is built on top of the storage. It allows you to manage virtual machines used both by external users and internal platform components. KVM functions as the hypervisor, with QEMU as the emulator. VirtIO drivers are used for device virtualization. Scheduler is an important component to enable hardware infrastructure allocation for your VMs. This is what determines which physical server to deploy a VM on.

This layer also includes other Infrastructure services.

The next level includes platform services (Platform as a Service, PaaS). These include Data Storage & Analytics, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence (such as Yandex SpeechKit and Yandex Translate), and others.

By using Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Resource Manager, you can enable role-based access control for your resources: each user gets a role that permits certain operations. For example, the editor role allows the user to create, delete, and edit resources, but disables resource access control.