Maestro: To Buy or Not to Buy?

Selecting an effective tool for your virtual infrastructure optimization is a complex task. It needs a deep investigation of the options on the market, the details of their offerings, checking if the provisioned feature set meets your needs and expectations.

Even if the vendor provides a free tier, the effort of applying the necessary configurations can take several days, and after that, you need to learn how to use the new tool properly.

Thus, getting the understanding if a tool fits you may take even weeks. And the price of a mistake – if it does not – is very high, because effort and time are spent in vain – and you may be as far from your initial goal as you were at the very start.

However, with Maestro you can see if it fits your business in terms of infrastructure and costs optimization in just a few days – and any intermediate result will still be helpful even if you decline Maestro at the end.

So, how does this work?

 

Day 1. Basic resource optimization

One of the main ideas coming to mind when speaking about cost optimization is – optimizing specific resources. The main questions here are:

• Are there instances, that take too much capacity, but do not use it effectively?
• Are there instances that look forgotten – do not have any changes in performance and remain low-utilized for a long time?
• Are there instances whose lifecycles have consistent load patterns, which may suggest creating a schedule for starting and stopping them when they are not needed?

At the beginning of your acquaintance with Maestro, we can give you the answers to these questions. And – moreover – generate the recommendations and cost saving estimations for the top 10 resources.

All we need is read-only access to your infrastructure data (which, of course, will be treated according to the top standards of security and compliance). This should not be the production environment – for the demo purposes, we will be glad to show Maestro capabilities on a demo stand or test infrastructure.

If you get impressed with the results (and feel free to compare them with the recommendations given by the respective cloud provider’s analytics tools)– we are ready to take the next step.

Day 2. Get more details

As we already have the read-only access to your infrastructure, we are ready to reveal the basic set of the analytic and optimization features provided by Maestro.

• Real-time dashboard identifying the main cost and usage trends in your infrastructure
• Real-time financial reporting that provides the data about the costs of your resources at the moment, updated as soon as the cloud provider shares this info. Unlike AWS native tools, for example, you do not have to wait till the end of the month to see the costs, or have specific permissions for that.
• Monthly and weekly reports that summarize the utilization and costs, provide optimization recommendations, inform about security and compliance issues and suggest remediation actions.

If you find useful what you can see here, we are ready to go to the next step.

 

Day 3. Infrastructure Remediation

While on the previous step Maestro has detected points for optimization and improvements, it is high time to implement the mentioned changes.

In addition to in-built tools and services (such as Scheduling or AWS SecurityGuard), Maestro has several tools that enable setting up automation that would introduce the infrastructure changes. Terraform templates, Maestro CLI and API, Chef – using them, we can set up custom logic to implement the remediation changes perfectly fitting your case.

 

Day 4. Expand the possibilities

Once the optimization goals are met – what else can Maestro offer?

Maestro covers requirements related to all aspects of a modern cloud management solution. It is not only about infrastructure optimization, but also about:

• Provisioning and orchestration – which allows you to create and manage virtual resources in several clouds in a unified and clear way, without the need to be an expert in each selected cloud.
• Service enablement – which provides you with a vast variety of management tools and possibilities, including both manual and automated flows.
• Meeting the security and compliance requirements – and it covers 15 industry-standard benchmarks for this
• Inventory and classification – with the possibility to detect resources and changes in them with close-to-real life mode
• Monitoring and observability – with close integration with native monitoring services, as well as own solutions and third-party tools

All the capabilities are provided in a unified way irrespective of the used cloud providers, which adds extra value to hybrid infrastructures.

Once your account is already connected to Maestro, we can expand its possibilities for you to have a real hands-on experience with all these options.

 

Day 5. Ready to buy?

Thus, just within several days, you will have a valuable hands-on experience with Maestro which will allow you to make the decision to get a license for it.

So what are the options?

Maestro offers several approaches that can be combined to perfectly fit your enterprise needs and lifestyle.

• The SaaS and SaaS + Private Agent allow you to connect your accounts in public clouds and, if necessary, infrastructures in private datacenters.
• You can also select the scope of features to be available for your – from read-only inventory and budgets control – to refined automated management and customized service catalog.

The pricing is to be discussed individually, but the general approach is as follows:

• For public clouds: 3% of all total monthly infrastructure cost
• For private clouds: 50 USD yearly per work element (where a work element is a VM, a DB, a Kubernetes host, etc).

 

To sum up

As you can see, you do not need much effort to have a real-life experience with Maestro and see if it is the tool you were looking for. Although Maestro is not a silver bullet, our experience shows that it brings great value to infrastructure and cost optimization for enterprise virtual infrastructure (both single-cloud and hybrid ones).

It also has a vast range of tools that allow to control and enhance the infrastructure by other parameters, deployment time end effort, security, reliability, events, and performance transparency.

You do not pay anything till you get to the Day 5 events and license purchasing. Still, by that time, you will already have valuable insights and recommendations for your infrastructure.

So, to buy, or not to buy  - will be no longer a question.