Russian Search Giant Launched Free Cloud Service "Cocaine"

Russian go-to search engine used by the overwhelming majority (60%) of local users, Yandex, has recently launched a free and open-source challenge to Google’s App Engine called “Cocaine”. Yandex ranked as the 4th largest search engine worldwide, accounting for over 150 million searches and over 50.5 million visitors daily.

The open-source platform as a service (PaaS) allows creation of custom cloud-hosted Internet applications, such as the Google-owned Panoramio location-based photo service, which supports C++, Python and JavaScript programming languages, along with Java and Racket support in development.

You can download this instrument on GitHub and install it on most custom hosting web servers, thus providing an automatic scalable platform able to manage custom web applications and their processing demands. The experts explain that the difference between Yandex’s Cocaine and Google’s App Engine is that the latter’s offering solely provides web app hosting on its own servers, while Cocaine can be run on personal web hosting in any part of the world – and crucially, following the revelations of National Security Agency – not necessarily routed through the United States.