Top 5 Questions About Maestro: Automation and Multi-Partners Finance

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, the most relevant would be using the native approaches to the billing, with referring to their own budgeting APIs.

For private clouds, it proved effective to calculate pricing based on the consumed capacities (for example, CPU/RAM/Storage) – with the values being based on the price of the hardware/software needed, datacenter maintenance, etc.

In a multi-cloud infrastructure, it is also essential to create a centralized entry point to billing information across all clouds, bringing to the display the values representing the same categories, which are, at least:

• Total cloud price
• Total region price
• Price per service/resource

3. Have you already conducted DevSecOps and how would you implement it?

Maestro has powerful automation tools, including a strong integration with Terraform. It not only allows using “standard” Terraform templates, but also brings unification to automation by introducing a cloud-agnostic Maestro Terraform Provider. AWS CloudFormation, Azure Bicep are also supported to meet the needs of the native services users.

Maestro takes the best security practices of supported cloud providers. It uses their tools and enables detailed and comprehensive security audit necessary to meet high standard security requirements and pass certifications. Additionally, there are third-party tools integrations (Qualys, Custodian) and own mechanisms that ensure the security of infrastructures managed by Maestro, which include access with the corporate AD/SSO, customizable role-based access control, Security checks and reports, native monitoring tools, events audit, email alerts and push notifications.

4. How would you develop, manage, and provide architecture blueprints for standard use cases (like web applications)?

One of the industry standards in creating blueprints is Terraform. Maestro has deep integration with Terraform, which provides:

• Integration with GitHub
• Catalog of templates
• Lock the Template option
• Cost estimation for the template
• Extended functionality for reviewing stacks

Additionally, Maestro provider for Terraform, allows creating cross-cloud and cloud-agnostic templates which brings more control and unification to the infrastructure management across the enterprise.

5. Which technical use cases can be supported by properly implemented standardized tags?

Standardized tags provide a consistent and uniform way to label and categorize resources across an organization's cloud infrastructure. The following use cases can be covered with tagging in Maestro:

Resource Organization and Management: Tags can be used to categorize and organize cloud resources. By applying tags based on attributes like environment (development, production, staging), department, project, or cost center, it becomes easier to search, filter, and manage resources.

• Cost Allocation and Budgeting: Tags can be leveraged to track and allocate cloud costs to specific teams, projects, or business units. Thus, organizations can gain better visibility into their cloud spending and effectively manage budgets. Also, expense limits can be set for specific tags, which allows more control for expense planning.
• Security and Compliance: Tags can play a role in enhancing security and compliance efforts. By using tags to identify resources belonging to different security zones, regulatory requirements, or data classifications.
• Automation and Orchestration: Tags can be utilized in automation and orchestration workflows. With Maestro automated lifecycle management by tags is enabled.

Of course, the mentioned questions are only a part of all that can arise when considering a cloud management solution for an enterprise. They say, it's better to see Maestro once than reed a dozen of articles :) Thus, if you would like to see it working and find questions to your specific questions, do not hesitate to Request a Demo on Maestro web-site!