Of course, while abroad they use cloud services more actively than in Russia. According to Gartner , in 2019 the global public cloud market amounted to $ 242.7 billion, and in our country it is still 73 billion rubles (~ $ 1 billion), follows from the TMT Consulting report , although in Russia this market is growing rapidly.
Our international customers are already using cloud-based solutions such as ABBYY FlexiCapture and Cloud OCR SDK... They help customers to automatically recognize barcodes, extract amounts and dates from invoices and much more - and do it all from all kinds of devices, different operating systems, conveniently and safely. We would like our smart solutions to become even more accessible to users. Indeed, even in a pandemic, companies all over the world still need to process invoices, prepare tax reports, compare what is written in small print in different versions of loan agreements, and also implement solutions for remote customer service. So that all these tasks can be solved at any time, anywhere and in the required volume, we have taken a course towards integrating our products with cloud technologies.
That is why in 2019 a chief architect appeared in our team - a person with good knowledge of approaches to creating software architecture in a B2B company and with extensive experience in building and developing cloud services. It was Vladimir Yunev, in the past - a cloud architect and an expert on strategic technologies Microsoft, known in the community on Habré as @XaocCPS .
We talked with Volodya about what the chief architect of ABBYY and his team is doing, what skills and knowledge are important for such a specialist and what kind of IT architectures the future belongs to.
- To become the chief architect, you must have come a long way. Tell us, how did you start and how did you develop in the profession?
- I started working at the age of 17 in a company that was formed by the teachers of the university where I studied. There, in C ++ and assembler, we already in 1998 did what is called the IoT today. We have automated processes to ensure the safety of mines: for this we collected dozens of metrics, analyzed them, and predicted explosive situations. After gaining experience in low-level programming, I went to work for a financial institution, where I was engaged in client-server development. Then he moved to a large IT company, where he began to develop the first products based on web technologies. Around 2005, I moved to the Sverdlovsk Region and there I worked on a large public banking portal, which is still functioning.
In Yekaterinburg, I met a crowd of developers using Microsoft technologies, and then with the company's technical representatives. We talked a lot and once with one of the employees decided to write a book about ASP.NET MVC, a new technology at that time . The book came out a year later and sold out in a couple of weeks.
I continued to closely communicate with Microsoft specialists, we did joint projects, and soon I received a job offer. In 2011, I became an expert on Microsoft strategic technologies and in 6 years gained all the basic skills I have now. It's hard to overestimate how much work in a large global IT company gives. Having gained experience in web and cloud technologies, helping to implement and use them in startups, partners and Microsoft customers, I moved to the main role for myself - a cloud architect.
A cloud architect helps the company's clients to effectively use purchased cloud services and technologies. I have worked on projects in such large companies as Sberbank, Kaspersky Lab, Thunder (Magnit chain), Baltika and others. In addition, we talked with ABBYY, where we had many good friends.
- How did you get to ABBYY and why exactly as the chief architect?
- Actually, it's a funny story. At that time, I had been working as an architect at Microsoft for over three years. In the fall of 2019, I was vacationing with my family in Turkey and somehow looked at the beach notifications on my phone. One of them, life-changing, was from LinkedIn with a list of “right for you” vacancies, among which I noticed the position of Chief Architect at ABBYY. It was possible to respond to the proposal in one click, and I decided to tempt fate, not really counting on the result. I was not looking for a job, but I always looked at the market, studying what technologies and skills are required in our time. The position of Chief Architect in one of the market leaders then immediately seemed to me a logical career development. As a result, I became the chief architect and got involved in the work on some very interesting projects for the company.
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- Yes, I came to ABBYY in the midst of a rather complex and large restructuring of the company's internal structure. One of the innovations was the emergence of my position. It is connected with ABBYY's decision to take a course on the development of modern cloud architectures, as technology trends, the market, and the customers themselves declare very specific requirements for products and technology stack. In addition, modern development is very energetic, and without the use of new methods, approaches and technologies, it becomes almost impossible to achieve fast and high-quality releases. As a result, it is the choice of modern tools and architectures that becomes a competitive advantage that allows us to meet the demand and needs of customers.
The architect is one of the few in the company who sees the entire project at once. He must be responsible for ensuring that a large product created by many teams at once is consistent and successful in everything. This is called architecture - the art of designing something large from many small parts.
- What do you do at ABBYY every day?
- At ABBYY, we develop solutions that help companies automate processes and solve routine tasks faster, for example, process information from hundreds of thousands of invoices, invoices, acts and enter data from them into accounting systems.
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At the same time, when developing a solution for public clouds, we also use managed ready-made services. They offer public clouds, and in our cloud we use these tools to further reduce the cost of their maintenance and support. For example, any cloud provider offers out-of-the-box messaging, blob storage, managed databases, and many other components, including managed Kubernetes clusters. All this allows you to develop a product even faster and provide a better service.
In addition to the actual architectural tasks, I lead the Chief Architect Office, which includes various teams, one of which is the shared libraries team. Shared libraries are the building blocks that companies use to build parts of large products. Their most important component - the NeoML library of algorithms and machine learning - we recently released with our cool team on GitHub as open source.
- Tell us about NeoML: how did you prepare to launch the library on GitHub, and what challenges did you face?
- NeoML is a large-scale project that the ABBYY team has been working on for more than one year. We talked about how the creation of the library and its technical details took place in a recent post on Habré .
I joined the company on December 19th and was assigned to lead the release of the framework in open source. A really cool team from various departments worked on this. We officially published NeoML on GitHub on June 16th. A lot of work was done in six months: preparation and inspection of the source code, creation of sample applications, translation of documentation and comments, organization of a marketing campaign, legal support and many other small tasks. The most interesting and rather difficult task was choosing the name of the library. This deserves a separate article, but, in short, it is rather difficult these days to choose the name of an IT product so that it does not violate the trademarks of other market participants.
NeoML is the pride of the company, in the library we have collected many years of experience in the development of intelligent products at ABBYY and the technological contribution of dozens of people. This is not a raw project, but a mature set of tools that we have been successfully using in commercial products for a long time. Essentially, NeoML is ABBYY's technology foundation and is now available to everyone on the GitHub platform.
In the first month alone, we received over 400 stars on GitHub and a ton of positive feedback from both the community and our customers. They have enthusiastically reacted to their partner sharing their technology on an open platform. For many customers, this is the confidence that the product they are using really has unique intellectual capabilities.
- Tell us a little about your team: are there many people in it, how do you interact?
- The NeoML team is small but very professional and I am proud to work with them. We have 5 developers, including a team lead, project manager and devops engineers who help us with infrastructure tasks. Experienced technical writers help us with the compilation and translation of documentation. In addition, our team is supported by the leadership of the Product Development Department, which includes R&D. It actively participates in the strategic planning of the library's development.
- What are your impressions of the atmosphere at ABBYY? Is the company different from the other places in which you have worked?
- In the early days at ABBYY, an amazing discovery for me was that many people have been working for the company for ten or more years and continue to grow professionally. This is very rare for IT companies with constant staff turnover. Probably, this is facilitated by a special open atmosphere, where employees value human relations at work, respect everyone's opinion and solve all difficulties together. Many come here after graduation and, developing in the same place for a long time, successfully build a career. This, by the way, can be both vertical and horizontal growth.
ABBYY is an international company. Many colleagues work in overseas offices, and we periodically communicate online. In addition, I and other employees are invited to accompany meetings with major clients around the world - from the USA and European countries, where we communicate and answer questions, talk about our architectural and technical solutions. Customers today have deep technical knowledge and want to know the details of products.
- In your opinion, what knowledge, skills and experience is important for a good chief architect?
- Huge outlook and experience in different projects and in different positions. It helps me a lot that at various times I was engaged in systems programming, development of business systems and distributed web systems, worked as a technical sales and technology evangelist and, of course, was a cloud architect in the largest vendor. This experience allows you to look at projects from many angles in order to make the right decisions, which is what is required of an architect.
Staying with your knowledge is not enough. It is necessary to constantly monitor the current trends and development of key technologies and services, cloud and other platforms. Everything in our industry is changing very quickly, knowledge becomes obsolete, new tools and approaches to problem solving appear.
Keeping in touch with trends will require a careful selection of sources of information that will deliver news on a daily basis. These can be the accounts of influencers (another term from evangelism, which means key persons in one direction or another) in social networks; Blogs of the largest vendors of companies that influence the market with their products and contributions to technology (for example, AWS, Google and Azure blogs on new products in the clouds); news aggregators by topic from both major publications and enthusiasts who publish a selection of news and technical articles. Finally, subscribe to one of the technical literature services to get access to the latest books and publications.
- What advice would you give to those who want to become a chief architect?
- Read a lot, strive for large and complex projects. Don't be afraid of mistakes and change of scenery. Get out of your comfort zone - this is the only way to grow further. Learn, learn more, don't stop and you will succeed.
My top 3 books for aspiring distributed architects are:
- Cloud Native by Boris Scholl, Trent Swanson, Peter Jausovec
- Fundamentals of Software Architecture by Mark Richards, Neal Ford
- Kubernetes: Up and Running, 2nd Edition by Brendan Burns, Joe Beda, Kelsey Hightower
- Do you have a vision of what the future holds for the market of intelligent information processing and analysis of business processes in 5-10 years?
- Firstly, I really hope that soon we will completely abandon paper carriers and my child will no longer be faced with paper forms in the workflow. Everything goes towards this, a lot is already in digital.
At the same time, the volume of information will grow even faster. According to IDC Data Age 2025 Research, by 2025 the total new data will increase to 175 ZB, up from 33 ZB in 2018. It seems to us that there is a lot of information around, but there will be even more of it. What to do with it? Analyze, sort, highlight the meaningful and automate all these processes in order to see only the most useful. And here the experience of ABBYY will come in handy. Our clients receive the most advanced tools for information extraction, data mining and automated process analysis. Every year we make our products more and more intelligent and smart, and our customers use this to manage the flow of information.
In 5-10 years, more and more often decisions will be made by artificial intelligence and algorithms based on more and more complex models and mathematical apparatus. And we at ABBYY are bringing these days closer with our developments.
- As a chief architect, what do you think is the architecture of IT projects in the future? Where is everything going?
- Everything moves in a spiral. The current trend - distributed development based on microservices - is already beginning to be criticized, and monolithic systems that seemed "bad" yesterday are suddenly, with a reorganization, gaining many supporters.
Computing power is growing at a tremendous pace. Tasks that previously required a separate cluster of many servers are now being solved on almost one processor. This is followed by a rethinking of architectural approaches.
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