Maestro Blog

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...

Having the detailed information about virtual infrastructure "as is" is not enough for effective infrastructure management, financial governance, security assessment, and remediation. In fact, a team can use the raw data, but if it comes to large cross-cloud infrastructures, processing it would take lots of time and effort. This is where automated and ML-empowered analytics comes to the stage. Maestro incorporates an effective approach that lets the user benefit from the analytics and recommendation mechanisms offered by the public cloud providers themselves, as well as from Maestro own tools. The outcome of the analysis are recommendations that can be used to improve virtual infrastructures in different dimensions.  The user can take not a resource-, but a recommendation-oriented view on the infrastructure, with different types of recommendations being addressed to the users with different roles and goals.  For example, security insights are addressed to security experts,...

Reporting is one of Maestro's key features, which turns a wide set of its tools and capabilities into a convenient information delivery process. Maestro financial and analytic reports are initially designed to face users with the different types of tasks and levels of responsibility.  We have already described some of the reporting features in the articles like  Maestro Reports for Cost Analytics and Optimization  or  Size-based approach to cloud infrastructure analytics , as well as you can find related posts by FinOps and Analytics labels.  Today, we would like to uncover a couple of new features, that enforce significantly the enterprise-level dimension of Maestro reporting: a set of C-Level infrastructure and costs reports, and the new concept - "Linked accounts" which allows you to build a more effective infrastructure hierarchy within your organization. Linked Accounts: Improved Accountability Traditionally, there was the case when one project owned one ...

Maestro has typically paid lots of attention to virtual instances as the main type of resources to focus on.  However, this approach was applicable when the majority of projects used Infrastructure as code approach. Now, when infrastructures rely more on platform services and cloud native approaches, it became clear that we need to support more details and resources.  We faced the user's need to focus on analyzing usage of specific services, by supporting the inventory and reporting for all of them. Thus, Maestro Management tab now includes the All Resources mode where you can review not only virtual instances, but also resources belonging to any other service used within your account. By clicking a specific resource you can not only see its detailed information, but also perform basic actions such as manage tags or assess the resource security. In addition, Maestro got an extra power and ability in managing Kubernetes clusters, SSH keys, and storage volumes. Managing Kuberne...

There are various assessment and audit services that let providers prove their offerings are safe and won’t bring a Trojan horse into a customer’s enterprise citadel. Among them, the Cloud Security Alliance stands out. This is a world’s leading organization dedicated to establishing and promoting security best practices for Cloud computing environments. One of the CSA activities is the creation and support for the STAR (the Security, Trust, Assurance, and Risk) Registry – a one that docments the security and privacy controls provided by cloud computing offerings. And we are glad to announce that Maestro has just reached the Level 1 within the program, thus proofed its maturity and reliability. You can find the Maestro listing on the CSA STAR Registry page . What does this mean, practically? STAR level 1 means that Maestro team has passed the self-assessment by filling the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) to verify that Maestro is compliant with the CSA Clo...

The news that HashiCorp switches its Terraform license from the Mozilla open source Mozilla Public License (MPL) v2. 0 to Business Source License stirred up the technical society across the globe. It’s no wonder, as Terraform has become an integral part of numerous businesses ecosystems and infrastructures, and the BSL license restricts using Terraform for creating commercial products, unless a separate agreement is mage. Terraform is also an important part of Maestro Infrastructure as Code engine, and it’s high time to clarify: how does the new Terraform Licensing affect Maestro customers.   What is BSL 1.1 License for Terraform? You can find the full license text   and the detailed FAQ on the official HashiCorp website, However, here is a brief summary: You can use Terraform for free for non-commercial (internal and personal) usage and need an additional agreement for production usage. For integration partners that build integrations with HashiCorp products, inclu...

Open Sourcing has become an integral part of the engineering community. Both using Open Source tools and publishing your own solution may bring benefit to a product, once done wisely. Using Open Source tools allows project teams to empower their products by specific well-tested functions, reducing development costs and taking the best of the community expertise. Publishing own solution brings more attention to the product, enriches it with the fresh ideas and solutions resulting from collaboration with the community, and builds trust due to the product transparency and minimization of the vendor lock. Several months ago, Maestro started it's own Open Source journey, and the road goes into both these directions. Maestro to Open Source With its modular architecture, Maestro is convenient for sharing specific engines and solutions with the community. We carefully investigated which modules, or engines, can be interesting and useful, as well as studied the best practices and experience...

In our previous post , we started the topic of top questions related to Maestro , which included those about Maestro as a SIAM platform and Maestro resource management approaches. In this article, we are facing another popular questions - focusing on finance and automation. 1. How would you organize the multi partner billing process? Using a SIAM framework which supports multi-layered organizational structure allows organizing billing process for multiple cost objects, that can be assigned to different partners. This can be organized wither via using multi-tenant approach, where cloud accounts are matched to different tenants, thus the whole billing for a specific tenant goes to a specific partner. Alternatively, in case a single account is used by several partners, infrastructure can be split within a tenant, with tags, or based on the resource ownership concept. 2. What are the relevant price items which would build up the structure of your cost estimation? For public cloud providers...

New trends keep on hitting the Cloud Market, caused by both changes in infrastructure creation approaches, and enterprises' aim to make the infrastructures more effective - in performance, and from the financial point of view. While communicating to project teams and customers, Maestro team has collected a set of typical questions, and we decided to aggregate the answers in a series of two blog posts. And we would like to start with the questions, related to one of the hottest topics now - Maestro as a Service integration and Management Platform.  1. How should a SIAM model from your point of view look like? SIAM is a framework needed to manage multiple service providers and their services effectively, in a unified manner, by incorporating them into a single platform.  Maestro as a SIAM framework allows arranging effective operation and infrastructure services for an enterprise.  It has an API-first approach which allows both effective adding new own components, as well ...

In the modern world, the application focused on meeting enterprise business needs are widely accompanied by additional tools and services. They are aimed to support the business applications’ performance, reliability, and security, as they enable necessary processes, such as logging, monitoring, load balancing, auto-scaling, cost allocation, etc. When a business needs a pack of applications, each application needs a similar set of supporting tools. In such cases, the number of tools and services that perform similar tasks grows dramatically across the whole infrastructure.  This especially relates to the cases when different teams create, use, and control different applications. As a result, the overall enterprise infrastructure becomes overloaded by duplicating items, which leads to extra costs and extra effort for supporting the whole set. Additionally, the applications management, audit and health check is initially decentralized, which also gives extra load for the team, and p...

The value of proper scheduling is hard to underestimate. With modern enterprises having hundreds of instances across multiple clouds, arranging proper scheduling requires specific attention. This applies both to organizing the infrastructure and creating an effective scheduling plan. Some time ago , we spoke about the basics of the scheduling approaches and the ways Maestro supports them. Today, we are going to look into the latest improvements in the scheduling offering which bring the whole experience to a completely new level. Before going on, you can find a brief video overview of the Scheduling mechanism in a video below: Schedule types: What’s the issue? Effective infrastructure management needs you to arrange the proper resource sorting. This can be based on the environment type (env, prod, QA, etc), affected user teams (marketing, development, DevOps, etc), geography, etc.   This is where using tags and splitting resources across different regions or clouds works perfe...

These days, it’s hard to go online and do not get into the word-wide trend for OpenAI’s ChatGTP. Everybody is discussing it, checking the new tools capabilities and knowledge. It was impossible to resist the temptation and check what ChatGTP knows about Maestro, based on its site and blog. Why would I need  (https://www.maestrocontrol.cloud )? As an AI language model, I do not have access to your specific circumstances or needs, so I cannot provide a definitive answer as to why you would need https://www.maestrocontrol.cloud/. However, I can provide some general information about the benefits and features of this service, which may help you determine if it is right for you. https://www.maestrocontrol.cloud/ is a cloud-based software platform designed to help businesses manage their operations and workflows more efficiently. Some potential reasons why you might consider using this service include: Improved productivity : The platform can help you automate and streamline many ...

Analytics expect that businesses will rely on Cloud even more in upcoming years, quickly moving to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and cloud native architectures. Naturally, with infrastructures growing and evolving dramatically, the cost-related questions get to a totally new level, and need new approaches. The most common issues that the enterprise face when trying to balance between effective infrastructures and effective spendings, are: Blurred responsibilities for Cloud expenses Unclear responsibilities for resources planning and usage Unclearly organized environments and per-environment tracking Inability to find the correlation between cloud initiatives and business goals Inability to keep to the expected budget and to predict how cloud costs changes after implementation of new business solutions Lack of communication between business, financial, and technical teams So here is where FinOps comes to the stage – to help with proper setting up the technological and business processes f...