The Prozorro system is an electronic public procurement platform that has been operating in Ukraine since 2016. It ensures open access to public tenders, and is a connection link between business, government, and the civil society. Thanks to the Prozorro system, everyone can check the procurement deals on fairness, limit bribery, and have a chance to participate in tenders with their produce.

Task

In 2018, the Prozorro system migrated from Amazon Web Services to the Ukrainian data center, which was required by Ukrainian legislation. However, the company realized that in order to support the continuous activity and security of the system, it is necessary to run it in another data center.

As practice shows, the backup site is often ineffective for quick system recovery. The Disaster Recovery service utilizes resources that are mostly idle and fully utilized only in case of a main data center complete failure, while data loss is still possible.

Solution

The company decided to build the operation of the Prozorro system in two data centers simultaneously. This would make it possible to distribute productive components among data centers, which would lead to an increase in the fault tolerance of the system, as a whole, and the rational use of both data centers resources.

GigaCloud specialists built a completely isolated private cloud for the client on the OpenStack virtualization platform for this, and customized it to the client’s needs.

Result

After the client deployed its services in the GigaCloud private cloud, it received a number of opportunities:

  • It works on two sites built on different OpenStack and VMware virtualization platforms. This guarantees maximum fault tolerance of the system and the ability to freely choose the best solution.
  • A monitoring and notification system was built for different levels of support, and an access demarcation system was configured. A development and testing environment is also deployed in the private cloud.
  • Maintenance and modernization of resources is handled by the cloud provider. This ensures the optimal operation of the infrastructure.
  • The company has an individual engineer, a pre-sale manager and a sales manager.
  • We built an object file storage based on OpenStack Swift and distributed information between two data centers.

GigaCloud specialists carried out a complete update of the private cloud software without stopping the functioning of the Prozorro IT infrastructure in 2021. A number of the following operations were carried out for this:

  • hardware components were allocated (four servers and a data storage system);
  • a temporary cloud infrastructure was assembled and configured
  • the client’s virtual machines were migrated to the “temporary cloud”;
  • the main cloud software was updated;
  • the client’s virtual machines were migrated from the temporary infrastructure to the main cloud;
  • additional modules and memory reservation monitoring on hosts were configured;
  • we performed fault tolerance tests together with the client.

The Prozorro system now runs in a private cloud with the latest stable versions of OpenStack software components.

“State enterprises should not spend millions of dollars to buy server equipment, but rather opt for cloud technologies. Thanks to cooperation with GigaCloud, we distribute server capacity, and therefore are not greatly dependent on one data centre. This makes it possible to ensure the stability, availability, and security of the Prozorro system, where all state purchases are processed,” comments Roman Pazych, Prozorro’s IT director.