Transforming Life in Kazakhstan with hybrid cloud outcomes

2023-06-21 16:07

Mining and raw materials company Eurasian Resources Group is changing how citizens in Kazakhstan interact with their government and access public services. Through digitalization, its tech startups Smart Cities and BTS Digital (startups of ERG’s venture fund) are transforming public services, improving their accessibility, and speeding up the delivery of benefits. What is the result? A more efficient and citizen-centric government, with stronger citizen rights.

The need to transform public service delivery

Caring about ensuring that residents in the regions where the company is engaged in extracting and processing natural resources have better access to government services, Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) wanted to help digitize the provision of these services. The government of Kazakhstan partially owns the company and sees it as its mission to support projects with positive social impact. ERG decided that one of the best ways to make a difference was to transform Kazakhstanis' experience with digital services, particularly people’s interactions with the government. This led the company to build a portfolio of social impact startups, including BTS Digital.

Since its establishment in 2018, BTS Digital has helped improve the quality of life for Kazakhstanis by developing digital services that make it easier to do transactions with government agencies. These solutions were a lifeline to critical public services and enabled access to financial assistance during the COVID-19 crisis.

"Almost everyone in Kazakhstan has a smartphone, just like in many parts of the world. For ERG, this presents an opportunity to make people’s lives better by digitalizing public services and making them accessible via mobile phones," says Sergey Korobitsin from Smart Cities company (one of the startups of ERG’s venture fund), responsible for managing all IT infrastructures and data centers across the fund’s portfolio of startups.

Supporting ambitious digitalization projects

BTS Digital has pursued various projects in its first five years, from online payments to digital identification and a platform for submitting requests to government offices.

To support these ambitious projects, the company "Smart Cities" created a modern hybrid cloud infrastructure that could scale to support its growth and expansion. This included a powerful compute cluster with x86 processor architecture and high-performance storage with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) protocol to allow virtual machine backups on premises.

"We started with about 20 servers, but BTS Digital kept growing every year," says Korobitsin, who is Server Infrastructure, Virtualization, and Cloud Team Lead at Smart Cities. "We needed a large compute infrastructure, including compute servers, controller servers, and servers designated for running software-defined storage."

Korobitsin’s team has started choosing the largest batch of servers. They assessed several proposals and ultimately decided on a solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which centered on HPE ProLiant servers and HPE Apollo systems.

"HPE was the most agile in responding to what we needed," says Korobitsin. "They were always willing to answer our questions, like what processor could go with this motherboard. Their engineers went out of their way to help us with technical specifications so we could meet our requirements."

Digitalization projects reach more Kazakhstanis

With its HPE-based infrastructure enabling it to rapidly deploy OpenStack cloud computing on-premises, BTS Digital has accelerated several projects' development, testing, staging, and production.

"We serve requests for compute and storage power faster than before," shares Korobitsin. "In our traditional architecture, we would take up to 30 minutes to complete requests for virtual machines. Now using our HPE platform with AMD EPYC processors takes only one to two minutes, with no cloud operator involved."

"Productivity has improved because the infrastructure doesn’t take much time to maintain and allows us to go faster."

This performance has enabled BTS Digital to expand its digital services more quickly, rolling them out to users across Kazakhstan. For instance, more than 2.5 million citizens have used its unified system eOtinish, to file and track claims, complaints, and requests with government agencies. The company’s digital identification service, Digital ID, now has over 6 million users.

"Almost everyone in Kazakhstan has a smartphone, just like in many parts of the world. For ERG, this presents an opportunity to make people’s lives better by digitalizing public services and making them accessible via mobile phones." —Sergey Korobitsin, Server Infrastructure, Virtualization, and Cloud Team Lead, Smart Cities company (one of the start-ups of ERG’s venture fund)

Making life easier for ordinary people

These digital platforms have made it easier for the people of Kazakhstan to interact with the government and access important services. Through eOtinish, for example, citizens can file claims, complaints, and even lawsuits and get a final resolution—or at least a response from the relevant government organizations.

"Powered by our HPE platform with AMD EPYC processors, the service’s main goal is to strengthen the rights of citizen’s ability to communicate with authorities, request and obtain government services," says Korobitsin. This ultimately improves the service citizens receive from public institutions and their quality of life.

According to Korobitsin, "The government sees the real problems of Kazakhstanis. It analyzes appeals broken down by region, makes performance assessments of government bodies, and better understands people’s sentiments."

Crucially, one of the company’s social products provided a lifeline for people who lost their jobs or suffered a loss of income during the pandemic. They could use the system to apply for and receive much-needed social welfare payments.

Likewise, citizens continued to access important services through Digital ID, which provides digital identification using facial biometrics. Its users grew significantly during the COVID-19 crisis because people couldn’t visit local government offices due to movement and social distancing restrictions.

"Even today, it’s still being used by many people," Korobitsin says.

Providing modern conveniences to Kazakhstanis

Kazakhstanis can now make instant interbank transfers at a much lower cost outside government services. According to Korobitsin, "Previously, commercial banks didn’t want to allow cheap transfers. But the government enforced a law ordering it, and The Instant payment system is helping implement it."

Another fintech product, Aitu Wallet —like most BTS Digital apps—is integrated with the company’s messenger, Aitu, making transactions more convenient. Messenger can also be embedded in partner services to facilitate instant communication.

Enabling innovation with private and public clouds

Rolling out these services wouldn’t have been possible without BTS Digital’s modern hybrid cloud environment. The company’s HPE infrastructure currently supports two clouds: a private one for ERG’s ecosystem of startups and a public one accessible to Kazakhstani customers. Korobitsin’s team deployed 142 HPE ProLiant DL380 and 248

HPE ProLiant DL385 servers with AMD EPYC™ 7452 processors. They adopted HPE Apollo 4200 systems with Scality RING software for backup storage.

"We haven’t had any issues in terms of support, and HPE has great hardware quality compared to others," says Korobitsin. "Another benefit is that it supports massive deployments of operating systems."

"The government sees the real problems of Kazakhstanis. It does an analysis of appeals, makes performance assessments of government bodies, and gains an overall understanding of people’s sentiments." —Sergey Korobitsin, Server Infrastructure, Virtualization, and Cloud Team Lead, Smart Cities

Facilitating growth through better performance

The team is particularly pleased with its decision to combine HPE ProLiant servers with AMD EPYC processors, which they chose over another option because some users wanted AMD processor-powered virtual machines and preferred the CPUs' outstanding per-core performance.

"The proposed AMD EPYC processors included a faster baseline CPU clock speed, faster memory, and more PCIe lines compared to our competitive options," explains Korobitsin. "This means we can now offer AMD CPU- specific virtual machine flavors and deliver impressive performance in SR-IOV [single root input/output virtualization] cases."

"We are very enthusiastic about the AMD EPYC processors and will use them in cases where we require high performance and density in our servers. The CPUs offer more logical threads and performance for multithreaded applications, including cloud-based solutions."

Accelerated product development

In a first for Korobitsin’s team, it adopted commercial software to create object storage on-premises with native S3 API protocol. Running on the HPE Apollo 4200 system—part of the HPE Alletra 4000 family—Scality RING now allows the team to easily store backups of virtual machines in OpenStack and scale as needed to support future workloads. This enables BTS Digital’s DevOps engineers to step up development while efficiently managing their growing volumes of data.

"Many storage solutions offered us S3 compatibility incorrectly," explains Korobitsin. "Most of them said they could also store our backups in Amazon. But we needed storage using S3 protocol on our premises because our security requirements don’t allow us to store anything in a public cloud. Scality provided the solution that we needed."

More digitalization to create more impact

As BTS Digital pursues more digitalization projects, including those focused on AI and big data, Korobitsin’s team expects its hybrid cloud to support more virtualization and other workloads while enabling high levels of security.

"We deployed the solution to cover our growing compute and storage power requirements," says Korobitsin. "With it and HPE’s support, we’re confident we can continue to grow and create a greater social impact in Kazakhstan."

"We're confident we can continue to grow and create a greater social impact in Kazakhstan." —Sergey Korobitsin, Server Infrastructure, Virtualization, and Cloud Team Lead, Smart Cities

Mining and raw materials company Eurasian Resources Group is changing how citizens in Kazakhstan interact with their government and access public services. Through digitalization, its tech startup BTS Digital is transforming public services, improving their accessibility, and speeding up the delivery of benefits. The result? A more efficient and citizen-centric government, with stronger citizen rights.

"Powered by our HPE platform with AMD EPYC processors, the service’s main goal is to strengthen the rights of citizens in dispute with authorities. The government sees the real problems of Kazakhstanis. It does an analysis of appeals, makes performance assessments of government bodies, and gains an overall understanding of people’s sentiments." —Sergey Korobitsin, Server Infrastructure, Virtualization, and Cloud Team Lead, Smart Cities (start-up of the Eurasian Resources Group’s venture fund)