How UrFU students create apps with serverless technologies

The Ural Federal University (UrFU) ranks among Russia’s top 10 technical universities. Its Fundamental Informatics and Information Technology program trains the next generation of software developers. As part of their coursework, students here build software for real-world companies, while also facing challenges when making their finished products known and available online. To streamline their efforts, Yandex Cloud backed the university with serverless technologies for deploying student projects in the cloud.

Thanks to this initiative, 4 out of 20 third-year student teams successfully hosted their applications on Yandex Cloud, with two projects already delivered to customers, up and running in production. By adopting serverless solutions, students develop and publish their apps faster, gaining hands-on experience with modern software architecture practices and learning from real user feedback. Meanwhile, their customers enjoy ready-to-go products they can seamlessly integrate into their workflows straightaway.

The Fundamental Informatics and Information Technology (FIIT) program by the Ural Federal University is a premier IT program that trains future developers. The brightest students from across the Urals enroll here to learn how to solve real-world problems, for both people and businesses, using information technology. As part of their education, FIIT students work on building software products that benefit society. A key component of their hands-on learning is the Project Practicum course, where students form teams of three to five members, take on projects from real businesses, and spend a semester developing their solutions. By the end, each team should defend their project, presenting a finished product, such as a web app, to their respective customer.

However, student teams were often facing a major hurdle: even after creating valuable software, they struggled to deploy their apps for public use. After the presentation, these ready-to-go apps would remain stuck locally, on the team laptops and PCs, no matter how much potential they held for real-world implementation. A lose-lose situation, this left customer businesses without usable solutions, while the students lacked the motivation to focus on tangible results or learning.

The university sought an optimal way for easily deploying student software projects: one that would minimize costs while also capable of scaling seamlessly from zero to a few thousand users. After evaluating the options, the cloud technology emerged as the clear choice. The decisive factors were pay-as-you-go resource allocation and access to state-of-the-art managed solutions, well-known for streamlining both app development and deployment.

When selecting a cloud provider, the FIIT team prioritized accessible, real-world tools that would allow students to readily deploy projects without extensive training; this is where Yandex Cloud drew attention of the team. The YC serverless features proved particularly compelling, enabling one to comfortably develop apps, store data, and set up integration with other platforms without any need to create virtual machines or deal with infrastructure maintenance.

Cost efficiency was another critical factor. With serverless technology, the university only pays for actual resource consumption. Additionally, Yandex Cloud offers free tier that provides up to 1,000,000 free requests for serverless computing: an ideal solution for FIIT student projects, which typically have low infrastructure demands.

Beyond cost savings, cloud infrastructure is now the industry standard, so hands-on experience with it gives FIIT graduates a competitive edge in the job market. When using Yandex Cloud, students can quickly develop cloud competency through the free Cloud Services Engineer course by Yandex Practicum.

Considering these advantages, the FIIT team selected Yandex Cloud as its platform of choice.

First and foremost, the university needed an infrastructure solution with straightforward deployment, suitable for beginner developers. Yandex Cloud offers multiple approaches for deploying app projects. One popular option is Yandex Managed Service for Kubernetes^®; however, setting up a cluster in this case requires DevOps expertise. That is why the Project Practicum owners chose Yandex Serverless Containers instead: with it, the students can run containers without creating virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters, as well as upload web app images built with any programming language. The system automatically deploys the image, flexibly scaling based on how many requests it gets.

For serverless computing and data storage and processing, students use Yandex Managed Service for YDB, a solution for managing distributed SQL databases that delivers high availability and scalability combined with strong consistency and ACID transactions. In serverless mode, it fully automates scaling of the storage layer, query execution layer, and backups; thus, the system is manageable whatever the load and however unpredictable it is. YDB suits most projects, and using Yandex Managed Service for YDB, the university only pays for the number of actually processed queries.

Due to this serverless technology, students only need to set up a production environment once, during active development; after that, the product will run and scale automatically. Moreover, students do not have to request computing resources each time the app workload grows.

With Yandex API Gateway, the students get their apps to process API requests with minimal latency. A key advantage is its automatic scaling during peak loads, ensuring consistent response times; Yandex Cloud DNS manages access to the product’s website.

To build their app version, students simply run an SSH script through the Yandex Cloud CLI.

The deployed infrastructure is serverless, meaning the university only pays for data storage and operations. Thanks to the special Yandex Cloud pricing tier, the first 1,000,000 operations per month are free.

Initially, UrFU’s FIIT tested this deployment approach with a project developed for Yekaterinburg’s Days of Space festival.

Students built a booking system for events at Yekaterinburg’s annual Days of Space festival, held in celebration of Space Day.

Organized by the Want to Be Part of Science Foundation and backed by the Yekaterinburg city administration, the festival offers dozens of space-themed events, all free to attend, although the visitor capacity is limited. For example, the planetarium tours can only accommodate groups of up to 20 people. Kseniya Kantor, co-founder of Want to Be Part of Science, tasked FIIT students with developing a ticket-booking system for the festival.

There were just six weeks to complete the project, by April 1, with only three students in the project team.

To ensure production readiness, the team tested their infrastructure by deploying the app mock-up. The Python backend was hosted on Yandex Serverless Containers, while the React frontend was deployed in Yandex Object Storage. For data storage, they used Yandex Managed Service for YDB, while API Gateway provided a single URL for all components in the app. Closer to launch, the team registered a domain, with DNS and HTTPS certificates configured using Yandex Cloud services.

The app was released on schedule in early April. On April 8, festival attendees used tickets booked through the system to access their chosen events. The web app ran smoothly from April 8 to 15, processing bookings from around 650 unique users and issuing 2,000 tickets.

After the release, user feedback revealed the need to adjust the data type adopted for storing visitor birthdates; this was a valuable lesson in real-world development. This ability to iteratively improve from user feedback is one of the key advantages of using Yandex Cloud for educational projects, helping students better understand end-user needs and tailor their product accordingly. The team’s project was later named among UrFU’s top 24 student works of the academic year, and also one of the top four in IT.

Today, the students are leveraging the same infrastructure for their own production-ready solutions. Given the experiment’s success, UrFU’s FIIT now explores prospects for further integrating cloud platform services into its curriculum.

Yandex Cloud serverless technology enables UrFU students to develop practical applications, make them publicly available, and gather real user feedback. Aspiring developers can refine their architectural decision-making skills during their studies, gaining hands-on experience to strongly back their further careers. Meanwhile, UrFU has employed serverless technology to built a comprehensive academic environment, training the next generation of developers.

So far, four student teams from UrFU’s FIIT have deployed their apps in Yandex Cloud serverless infrastructure, with two projects advancing to commercial implementation and delivered to customers.

Moving forward, FIIT plans to scale this success in partnership with Yandex Cloud. This includes highlighting peer success stories to inspire students; in project presentations, awarding bonus points for cloud deployments; and providing ready-to-use app templates and best practices, including recommendations to enroll in Yandex Practicum’s Cloud Services Engineer course. As potential customers see the tangible results of student projects, they are increasingly eager to propose real-world product ideas for the UrFU students to bring to life.