X5 Group Salt

Main article: What is IaaS

2022: Salt Platform Launch

On May 17, 2022, X5 Group announced the launch of its own cloud platform. Salt is a private cloud based on open source X5 technologies and developments. This solution will reduce the cost of owning IT infrastructure, accelerate time-to-market digital projects, and reduce the carbon footprint by using the "green" energy-efficient technologies of data centers X5 and Selectel, where Salt operates. After solving internal business problems based on this platform, X5 considers bringing Salt to the open cloud market.

Salt provides not only infrastructure and platform services, but also a set of automated processes that allow a digital project to quickly start working in the cloud with all the necessary security settings. Within Salt, a special approach to data protection is implemented, which on the one hand provides a high level of information security, and on the other, it is convenient for users and does not slow down their work. Individual platform components are provided to X5 internal customers as a service, including data centers as a service for data storage and processing. This ensures 99.9% availability.

Together with the launch of Salt, X5 forms a different approach to working with infrastructure, having a cloud in high-tech data centers of partners. So Selectel completely takes over the service of servers, racks, communication channels, which allows you to significantly reduce the cost of platform services for X5 internal clients, as well as significantly increase the reliability and fault tolerance of the system.

The launch of Salt allows us to begin a cloud transformation, in which most of our information systems and key products will be transferred to a private cloud. X5 systemically approached the process of transition to its own cloud infrastructure, in the framework of which we ourselves determine the vector of system development, develop and implement services, operate the platform regardless of vendors and market fluctuations. Salt's capabilities will extend the user's client experience beyond the provision of traditional cloud services and provide any IT solutions to both the business and digital teams of the group using the cloud as a single entry point and billing organization, "said Anton Mironenkov, managing director of X5 Technology.

The project to create your own cloud was launched by X5 in 2021. The development of the solution was based on a combination of open source products, in-house expertise and the use of a service approach. The key components of the platform, such as orchestrator, portal, billing, as well as the general architecture of the platform are their own product. The private Salt cloud based on OpenStack and Kubernetes technologies is deployed in two data centers - its own data center in Moscow and Selectel, located in St. Petersburg. Using data centers, X5 is able to focus on business priorities by transferring physical infrastructure services to qualified partners.