Maestro for Cross-Cloud FinOps

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 for effective grounded spending decisions.

FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions (finops.org)

So, in a few words, what would a properly organized FinOps process bring to your business?

  • Effective teams collaboration
  • Clear Cloud usage ownership and accountability
  • Timely and proper predictions and reporting
  • Cloud value – driven decisions
  • Using proper pricing models based on the actual cloud usage model

Maestro is always at the very edge of Cloud trends – so, how does it face the FinOps expectations?

Maestro FinOps Tools

Maestro’s tools and capabilities related to costs management and control, as well as infrastructure review and optimization are quite high.

Initially, Maestro has been created as a single entry point for users with different goals and expertise. Thus, throughout the market-driven evolution, it became a convenient space for effective cooperation between Financial and Engineering & DevOps teams 


Transparent resources inventory, resource creation approvals, role-based access – on one hand, and financial quotas, detailed reporting, recommendations, tagging, ownership – on the other. These tools create a convenient space, where teams can cooperate on infrastructure review and planning, increase its effectiveness and take grounded spending decisions.

Maestro Recommendations

Maestro includes a wide range of reports and recommendations, providing multidimensional overview of the infrastructure status and optimization options.
The Insights give the information about tags, security status, costs, schedules and lifetime, providing the recommendations on the possible improvements and “fix it” buttons for quick reactions.
Recently, the Insights were empowered by the ML-based RightSizer mechanism that analyses the utilization trends of specific instances and provides the recommendations on their proper scaling, scheduling and shutdown.

Maestro Quotas

Quotas mechanism allows setting up account expenses limits and tracking these limits depletion. 
The limits can cover not only specific cloud, or region, but also specific environments, once their resources are properly tagged. 
Approval mechanism that can be switched on once a specific quota is depleted adds extra control over infrastructure growth.

Resource Ownership

Clear understanding of the ownership of existing resources is one of the keys to accountability in Cloud. 
With Maestro, virtual resources are assigned to specific users which enhances the investigations, and positions responsibility properly. The default owner concept allows to control even resources created automatically or from outside Maestro, as well as to pass the responsibility to a new user, if the initial owner leaves the account. 

Resource Tagging

Maestro allows tagging resources via its UI and CLI tools. Using tags allow effectively track the expenses by tag-based groups, plan expenses with the Quotas, and automate resources start/shutdown with schedules.
In-build tracking mechanisms detect the untagged resources and draw users’ attention to them, to improve the tagging coverage.

How Does This Works?

The listed tools, together with other Maestro features and capabilities, build a complex environment for effective multi-dimensional infrastructure analysis.

Ownership brings the accountability for the specific resources to the personal level, giving the responsibility to specific users and allowing direct communication between decision makers. 

Tagging provides clear distinguishing between environments, purposes, teams. Having this, the teams can build targeted strategies around specific groups of resources, keeping in mind the personal needs and goals with the Ownership concept. 

Quotas empowered by tags, allow to set up expenses expectations and reactions.

Recommendations match industry best practices to your actual infrastructure usage and suggest the best way for optimization, based on your specific situation and workload.

Thus, Maestro becomes a safe and effective entry point for effective cooperation considering different types of goals and expertise. Most of data, necessary for taking effective decisions, are given within the unified workspace. All decision makers can stay on the same page, analysing the past events, current situation, and expected trends to reach both business and financial goals of the enterprise.

The other important point: the enterprise Cloud transformation can be performed gradually. The cost savings, resulting from initial optimizations, can be used to implement new transformation steps for better performance and better benefit – and Maestro will help not only in planning this transformation, but also with tracking its effectiveness.

Related Posts

To find out more about Maestro capabilities in costs control, management and FinOps-related flows, enabled by Maestro, see the following posts:


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