Maestro – do we need a Swiss Knife for Cloud Management?
Currently, the market of cloud management solutions offers numerous options facing multiple cloud management challenges. These offerings are designed to provide customers with single entry points for management, analytics, costs control, and other business and technical goals. These solutions can be facing the needs of financial department, operations, development or other teams, and mainly focus on specific target audience and set of tasks.
Initially aiming to resolve its own infrastructure provisioning challenges, EPAM has created a powerful tool – Maestro, which addresses the users of all types, including those, who create, use and pay for the infrastructure. Now, 10 years later, Maestro has successfully expanded its “habitat” from internal corporate area to the product market. However, once it is there, the question arises – why should I, as a customer, chose Maestro among other offerings?
We can start playing a marketing game suggesting all types of challenges Maestro can face. However, we can just let it speak for itself.
In September 2020, Gartner published its new Cloud Management Wheel, which suggests the classification of tasks and aims faced by modern cloud management solutions. The wheel includes seven functional areas representing specific use cases, and five cross-functional attributes which face multiple use cases and wider goals.
This is a powerful tool which gives an answer a question: how a specific solution fits the goal of my business? How does Maestro fit it?
Recently, we performed a detailed assessment of Maestro corporate implementation (customized for EPAM) against the Gartner’s criteria, and now anyone interested can quickly answer the question if – and how- their business can benefit from using Maestro.
After the analysis, we figured out the following general coverage by functional areas:
Thus, we can see that Maestro is pretty good in Packaging and Delivery, Provisioning and Orchestration, security, and cost management, while migration and backup still miss significant features. However, pure numbers by area need more details to be clearly understood. And here we come to complementing the assessment of existing features with gap analysis.
As a result, for example, we found out that there is a market request for working with containers or creating event-based workflows. Missing these features, Maestro also loses the points for almost all functional areas (if you do not support containers, you also do not support container billing or inventory).
Anyway, having stronger and less developed sides is a natural situation for any product. In fact, Maestro is not aimed to be a real Swiss knife, and, probably, this is not needed. While specific areas can be covered by third-party tools, Maestro can focus on perfecting its armory for covering the others. (Still, the main gaps are already in the backlog).
Maestro can cover numerous requirements and expectations under a single entry point. It can also provide additional value by cross-cloud unification which covers resource management, audit, security assessment, complex reporting and analytics. Maestro does not imply any locks to your infrastructure, so you can easily combine it with any other tool or solution, if necessary. And, moreover, Maestro can be empowered by any new integration as fast as in six weeks only, of course, if the tool provides the necessary API.
Having the results of the Maestro assessment, we can perform a detailed estimation of the tasks you need to be solved for your business, and map your business to Maestro capabilities. One can also perform an additional assessment of how Maestro can compete with other cloud management solutions or sets of dedicated tools. Altogether, this will let us find the best way for you to benefit from the product.
All you need to do is share your Cloud story and expectations with Maestro team, and we will come back with the offering.
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