Association of Cloud-Oriented Technologies (AOT)

History

2025: Cloud Association Plan

Yandex Cloud, VK Cloud and Flant will create a non-profit Association of Cloud-Oriented Technologies (AOT). AOT will become an organization that will develop new approaches, standards and architecture of native cloud technologies without reference to a specific vendor. Any company using cloud technologies can become an AOT partner, and any IT specialist can become a participant. Yandex Cloud announced this on October 17, 2025.

The goal of AOT is to unite players in the Russian cloud market to popularize cloud technologies such as Kubernetes and Cloud-native. With this approach, applications and systems are initially designed for the company in the cloud, which gives more opportunities to scale the business, optimize costs and flexibility in choosing technologies. Partner status involves annual contributions to association projects and opens access to AOT projects and resources.

The key objectives of ESD are:

• Promote and implement cloud-native solutions through standardization of approaches and competencies in development.
• Support and development of open source solutions, as well as their implementation in the company.
• Popularization of cloud technologies and Kubernetes.
• Community development and unification.

At Kuber Conf by AOT, participants will be able to get acquainted with the Association: learn about its mission, plans for the coming year, structure and projects, communicate with the team, ask questions and apply for membership. Also at the event, the association plans to form an expert council State Of DevOps Russia. AOT invites all interested companies to become partners and participate in the work.

VK Cloud has supported the Kubernetes movement in Russia since 2018, providing Kubernetes customers as a service and actively developing the professional community. @ Kubernetes Meetup and VK Kubernetes Conf have brought together tens of thousands of specialists and engineers over 7 years. In 2020, together with partners, we organized the Kubernetes Evening School, a project that has already helped more than 15,000 specialists gain and systematize knowledge in the field of containerization. Members of the VK Cloud team are contributors to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and our Managed Kubernetes service is certified by the Kubernetes Conformance Program (CNCF). The creation of the Association is a logical continuation of our path. Together with Yandex Cloud and Flant, we are taking this work to the next level, creating an independent community to jointly develop standards and best practices. This will allow the entire Russian Cloud-Native community to gain access to technologies and join forces for professional growth, "said Dmitry Lazarenko, Product Director of VK Cloud.

At Yandex Cloud, we are actively participating in the Kubernetes community and have helped develop the competencies of engineers, DevOps specialists, K8s developers since the company was founded. During the platform, we have released 30 free courses on various aspects of cloud technology. About 73 thousand specialists graduated from them. We often post our own developments related to Kubernetes in OpenSource. These are, for example, interfaces for integration with cloud disks, an operator for managing cloud infrastructure, a provider for creating their own clusters in the cloud. The next step is, together with Flant and VK Cloud, to unite all specialists interested in developing the Cloud-native approach into an independent association. This makes it possible for new collaborations, joint projects and developments, including with open source, "said Grigory Atrepyev, head of Yandex Cloud.

The "Flant" engineering team has been working with Kubernetes since its public release. For many years, we have been implementing and supporting it in different infrastructures and sharing our accumulated experience with the community. We developed the Kubernetes platform and in 2021 posted it in Open Source. Since 2020, we have been conducting an annual State of DevOps Russia study, in which more than four thousand respondents take part to monitor the development of engineering practices and factors affecting the effectiveness of companies. We believe that basic cloud technologies should be available to everyone, and everyone should have the opportunity to contribute to them. Our joint task with partners from the Association of Cloud-Oriented Technologies is to unite the efforts of large companies and all engineers who are not indifferent to Open Source in order to accelerate the development of the industry as a whole, "said Alexander Titov, General Director of Flant.