Maestro Blog

Managing cloud costs effectively becomes increasingly important, as cloud services usage grows, with public cloud spending expected to reach $805 billion by 2025.  Cloud cost optimization involves controlling spending to maximize efficiency and value from investments. The Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report shows that 75% of organizations report increased cloud waste, with about 32% of budgets underutilized. This highlights challenges in visibility and resource management. Adopting best practices in cloud cost management is vital for companies to efficiently streamline and control their cloud expenses. In this blog post, we would like to summarize the recent Top Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices article, and highlight how Maestro, and the tools it is integrated with, help with the challenge. What is Cloud Cost Optimization? Cloud cost optimization is the practice of reducing overall cloud spending by identifying mismanaged resources, eliminating waste, and efficiently all...

The Year 2024 is coming to an end, and it's high time to sum up our achievements and future plan in the traditional summary and resolution post. While the Green Dragon is still here, we would like to start with summing up the past 52 weeks, taking the recap of the updates, news, and success cases we had - all that becomes a solid ground for our further movement. 2024: Main Steps and Updates Traditionally, Maestro development was focused on several main directions, as well as included a set of general updates and stabilization changes. General updates and stabilization The updates covering general Maestro performance and core functionality has been taking place throughout the year, with the massive stabilization closer to the end of the year.  These included not only performance improvements and bug fixing, but also important new features, such as the possibility to have the ReadOnly access to Maestro, a huge update to C-level, tenant-level, and resource-level report s, and decompos...

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...