Maestro 2022: New Year Resolution

2021 has just ended, and it was a year full of changes, challenges, and victories, for the whole technical world, and for Maestro, of course. 

Following the main technical trends, industry expectations and its initial roadmap, Maestro has faced numerous significant updates and improvements and got to a new level in different directions. Those, who have been with us for a while, are already acquainted with the numerous improvements and new features in security, audit, hybridization, and billing, which were delivered in 2021. If you only start investigating Maestro, follow the links to find the posts describing the most important features of the past year.

Now, when 2022 has already come into it’s rights, it’s high time to reveal our New Year’s resolution and highlight our main goals and directions for the next 52 weeks.

Hybridization

 According to Flexera's State of the Cloud report, “COVID-19 accelerates cloud plans and spend as more organizations adopt multi-cloud strategies and put more workloads and data into the cloud”.  The study says, that 97% of respondents use public clouds for their businesses, 80% use private ones, and 78% of respondents use hybrid (public+private) infrastructures.   

Maestro, having hybridization and unification among its top features, is planning to expand its integration capacities both horizontally, by adding new providers (for example, introducing a new big integration – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and completing the integration with HyperV and Nutanix), and vertically, by expanding the set of management capabilities for resources and services under control.

Automation

API-first concept behind Maestro architecture becomes a powerful starting ground for effective unified automation. 

One of the most powerful automation tools, which has already became an industry standard, is Terraform. Terraform providers, oriented on specific clouds, are convenient, as they allow access to many provider-specific features. However, for hybrid environments, using native providers means the necessity to create separate templates for applying in different clouds. This means more time and effort for templates creation and management.

To resolve this issue and provide Maestro users with powerful unified automation, we plan the following set of features and updates:

• Maestro has already introduced its own Terraform provider, and we plan to expand its capacities in 2022. The provider allows creating unified templates which would be applicable across all clouds supported by Maestro. The end-user does not need to know the details of each specific provider’s functionality – they can just get what they need in several clicks.  In any cloud. Or even in several clouds at once. 
  
  
• Private regions will also benefit from the effective mixture of the new Terraform provider and Chef. It enables additional automation and allows getting necessary software installed on the new instances right after the creation.
  
  In 2022, we plan to create a library of recipes to automate the installation of software which is most requested within the cloud users community. Opensource databases, such as MongoDB or PostgreSQL, are among the top priorities here. However, such solutions like RabbitMQ, or Nginx are also on the list.
  
  
• Automation does not live by Terraform alone. Automatic instance expiration, single SSH key for unified access to all instances, protection from resource updates, adding instances to the VIP list for quick monitoring, unified security scanning – these are only a part of features that will be expanded and added to Maestro in upcoming months.

Unification

Public clouds provide hundreds of services to meet all kinds of their customers’ IT needs. Managing all these services from a single entry point is a difficult task, provided that each of them has its own API and integration specifics.  To help users cope with this challenge, AWS, Azure, Google provide high-level API which allows receiving services meta information in a unified way. 

This year, Maestro users can benefit from this approach, as they will get a unified UI for more resources tracked by the solution. 

Now, Maestro management functionality is mainly focused on virtual instances. The All Resources mode on the Management page allows only reviewing other resources. This year, Maestro users will get access to the top 10 resource types of public cloud providers – not only for review but also for management.

Security

Security was one of the top priorities for Maestro evolution in 2021 and it keeps its position in the new year. 

• The Security as a Code approach, implemented via Custodian, is already introduced in Maestro. Now, you can use 20 customizable basic security rules for your accounts check. In 2022, we plan to expand the set of rules, so that they cover 15 main compliance packs.
  
  
• The other focus is the network security. Software-Defined Networks, IP addresses managements, subnets distribution, topology analysis – this is not the complete set of new features planned for Maestro.
  
  
• The case when a third-party system needs to have advanced permissions for pushing a configuration request to Maestro becomes more frequent over time. In the initial implementation, the permissions are granted, and then need to be revoked. In 2022, Maestro will get the functionality to allow VIP access to the infrastructure – by providing temporary tokens-based credentials for AWS, Azure, and GCP 

Usability

In Maestro, we analyze user feedbacks and constantly improve not only the functionality but also internal processes, which makes them clear for end-user and convenient for enterprise.

Thus, the core usability updates, planned for the upcoming year, are:

• UI localization – having the system in the users’ native language minimizes the time to use and raises the trust for the application. Although the first steps in localization are already done, the 2022 will bring wider coverage and new languages. 
  
  
• We will continue with the unification of web and mobile interfaces. Switch between them should be seamless and any effort for getting acquainted for new layouts should be minimized.
  
  
• Maestro reports and notifications are one of the main ways to communicate with the users. We are working on improving the letters library, making sure that all letters are clear, and are focusing specific business cases. 
  
  
• Maestro CLI tool is also under intensive development. We are already working on the tool usability by unifying the commands and parameters naming, as well as synchronizing them with the wording used on UI. However, among the ambitious plans is creating a CLI assistant which would analyze user activities in Maestro, suggest commands that can be used for workflow automation – and share the suggestions in respective emails

To Sum Up

The upcoming year will be interesting and intense. The modern world relies on Cloud as much as it has never did it before, and having an effective Cloud management solution is a significant part of success.

Unlike many similar solutions, Maestro does not focus on a specific type of users (like managers, or DevOps), thus becoming a corporate Cloud hub, with all necessary controls and information put to a single place. Quick time to use allows you not to waste your time for additional education, but spend it effectively for your business needs (or an extra coffee break with your friends ;))

Maestro meets 2022 already being a mature and enterprise-ready solution. However, the time flies, and the new expectations arise quickly. We are ready to face them, as well as to prepare a couple of bonus tricks. Stay tuned!