Maestro Blog

Maestro billing engine allows transforming virtual and hardware capacities utilization into bills , based on the events within their timeline, and states they get as a result of such events However, the modern world, with its dynamic changes in situations and requests, needs flexibility – and in billing, as well. The hourly cost of your datacenter maintenance may depend on external factors, like varying electricity costs (for example, cheaper night hours), which can let you make nightly hours of your infrastructure usage be also more affordable. You may also want to re-distribute the load between data centers or data center sections during peak hours by offering lower prices in underutilized zones, and higher prices – in those that are overloaded.  Season discounts, special offerings, and other pricing alterations are also on the list. You even may want to apply extra charges for your users access to public clouds, by adding a respective coefficient to the native provider’s bill. S...

Typically, for on-premises infrastructures, the enterprises use capacity quotas to regulate the amount of resources each team can use (in CPUs, Memory GBs, storage GBs, etc.). This approach is effective and convenient when all your resources are exclusively in your own data centers. However, the things get more complicated when a public cloud is added. In such case, using both the resource-based approach in your private DC, and public clouds’ pay-as-you-go, you need to make an extra effort to properly arrange your financial procedures and planning, as, in fact, you need to deal with two completely different calculation approaches. A pay-as-you-go approach for private data centers is a right decision if you aim to unify and simplify financial governance, planning, resource allocation and utilization accountability. An effective, powerful, and flexible billing engine is a keystone for such solution. Maestro has one, and further in this post, we will uncover the approaches it uses, and th...

Effective cloud usage for an enterprise requires various tools, including resource management, corporate integrations, and establishing effective communication with end users. By default, cloud providers offer crucial alerts out-of-the-box, with additional alerts being customizable and provisioned as a service. This setup works well once you use only one provider and a small infrastructure. However, in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, tracking complex infrastructures efficiently becomes more challenging. Enterprises have different methods to address these challenges, ranging from manual sorting to integrating third-party tools. However, not all these methods are flexible enough to respond promptly to technological updates and market demands. This is where the need for a better solution emerges, leading to our case study on migrating to Maestro. Problem Statement An enterprise using a hybrid cloud with AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenStack-based infrastructure utilizes a legacy syste...

In our previous post , we discovered Maestro as a part of the Open Infrastructure world, as well as its Open Source components and strategy. However, a modern platform is more than just about infrastructure. To increase efficiency, unification, visibility and control, it is important not only to establish effective infrastructure management, but also to set up control on the application layer. With the infrastructure layer being often hosted in multi- and hybrid- clouds, Microservices became one of the silver bullets for cloud-based and cloud-native applications within the past years.  They allow to package your applications properly so that they can be hosted on any platform. The parts that cannot be put to this type of architecture, are often re-platformed, or re-architected within the new provider.  Thus, a modern platform should be capable of both managing Cloud environments and empowering microservice-based applications development, delivery and management . Keeping the O...

The Cloud migration and adoption keeps on being a hot topic for modern businesses scaling from start-ups to multi-national corporations.  The scope of Cloud usage grows dramatically, and, meanwhile, grow the complexity of requirements, expectations, and the resulting infrastructures. Moreover, typically, more than one cloud provider is used, which leads to introducing various services, tools, offerings, and integrations that may differ significantly in usage approaches and procedures.  This gives extra complexity, as calls for the need to build an approach when all elements act as a single effective eco-system.  This is where the Platform Engineering concept comes from. It focuses on designing, building and maintaining platforms or frameworks aimed at supporting applications development and deployment. When it comes to Cloud Migration and adoption, a Platform is a resulting structure that connects all elements, atop which a cloud infrastructure is built. It is aimed to en...

Maestro was initially crafted as a hybrid cloud management solution. It enables managing both private and public clouds in a unified way, retrieving analytics for utilization, expenses, and security, and supports the establishment of automated workflows for DevOps. Recently, there has been an increasing demand for migration from on-premise VMware-based data centers to public clouds . Below, we give an answer to the question: How Maestro can facilitate such migrations ? The “Six R’s of Cloud Migration” Nowadays, cloud experts highlight the “Six R’s of Cloud Migration”, or migration strategies:  Rehosting (Lift and Shift) : Moving an application and its associated data to the cloud without making any changes to the application itself. Replatforming : Making minimal changes to the application to optimize it for the cloud, such as changing the database or middleware. Repurchasing : Replacing an existing application with a cloud-native version or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution....

The year is coming to the end, and it's high time for our traditional lookback on Maestro evolution, changes, and important events. The year of 2023 has been dynamic and full of updates, both technical and strategic.  We kept to our previous commitments , meanwhile adjusting to the new trends in Cloud and technologies in general.  We met our user's expectation and need for  cross-cloud FinOps, automated infrastructure analytics, security assessment and the "Fix it" button , aimed to simplify issues remediation. We also took into account the rising demand for  Open Stack-based resources, Cloud Native approaches,  AI/ML integrations .  As a result, we came up with our standard "six release per year" cycle, highlighted with the following milestones: Maestro Insights With the ML technologies growth, the amount of services offering infrastructure recommendations and analytics, grow. This is true for the public cloud providers' native services, as well as thir...