Ukraine's National University Uses StackOS To Assist Ukrainian Student Refugees
Warsaw, the capital of Poland took in over 300,000 Ukrainian refugees, nearly 20% of the city’s population in March 2022. Over half of this number, were students fleeing the country which became a conflict zone a month earlier. But while Poland and a few other countries were welcoming, most of the others were not. And for Ukraine’s 5.5 million students this proved to be a challenge.
Many countries shut their doors to Ukrainians either because they did not have the resources to house the refugees or they didn’t want to sever diplomatic ties with Russia. For teenagers leaving behind their parents and the only country they knew, this was devastating.
In order to make it easy to find countries, communities, and resources to help those fleeing the Ukraine-Russia conflict, a group of Ukrainian professors and students started the WORLD4UA.ONLINE project. The project presents an interactive map of the world containing information on — the condition of departure and residence for people forced to leave Ukraine.
The map above places countries in five categories based on how accommodative they are for Ukrainians. It presents information such as:
- The registration process for refugees
- Documents required to cross the border into the country
- Resources (food, housing, and work) are provided by the country
- Contacts of assisting organizations like charities, helplines, etc.
- Essential information on vaccination, pets-car, old-age care, etc.
World4UA also provides a way to donate directly to Ukrainian charities and a Telegram bot for Ukrainians to find out about their compatriots. So far, scores of Ukrainian students and parents have sought refuge in safe countries due to World4UA. Further, global charities can also direct their resources directly to communities of Ukrainians in foreign countries.
Cloud Relief
When World4UA was created, the Ukrainian students and the Department of Information Technology and Software Engineering from Chernihiv National University of Technology faced several hurdles. Due to the escalation of tensions, the students had to put up the website quickly and make it free and resilient from manipulation and attacks. For students to do this while escaping a country on the brink of war was a tall order.
The World4UA team evaluated various cloud computing providers to power their applications. However, many Cloud and DeCloud providers faced several shortcomings. Many required high payments for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates to communicate between the web server and browser, some took too long to load their website, didn’t have adequate counter-attack measures, or were simply difficult to manage.
Initially, the World4UA team looked to local Ukrainian cloud companies because they were closer to home. But many computing providers were debilitated because of the conflict. Even large cloud computing providers like Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure weren’t helpful due to them being expensive and inefficient for the World4UA project. The only provider that gave the World4UA what they need — resilient against attacks, easy to deploy, fast-load time, and fully decentralized was StackOS.
An excerpt from the IT department of Chernihiv National University of Technology blog reads,
“After all these learnings of the alternatives, StackOS was a clear winner and we decided to use StackOS….With StackOS it’s a lot cheaper than deploying on traditional cloud services…And of course, our deployment was super easy because we containerized our application in 5 minutes…comparing StackOS with the alternative DeCloud solutions, its’ ease of use and quick startup time made our decision very easy.”
This underlines the power of web3’s decentralism, according to Maksym Stotskyi, the creator of World4UA. Deployment took a matter of seconds for a minimum price. Due to the unstoppable nature of StackOS, the website was resilient to a “repulse of attacks” and any support-related queries were handled in no time by the StackOS team. Stotskyi said that StackOS made the world “effortless” for the World4UA team. He concluded by saying, “In our effort to serve the people in need, we are glad to find a partner like StackOS to enable us to make such an impact.”
About StackOS
StackOS is a cross-chain open protocol that allows individuals and organizations to share their computing resources and collectively offer a decentralized cloud; where developers around the world can deploy any full-stack application, decentralized app, blockchain private nets, and main net nodes.
We aim to provide the world with “The Unstoppable Infrastructure Protocol”, which will allow any person across the world to deploy their application without incurring heavy cloud management costs and freely run any application they wish to run. StackOS furthermore intends to help brick and mortar businesses around the globe, to go online cost-effectively and securely with minimal technical overhead.
