Maestro: Greeting the Green Dragon

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 third-party tools. However, each specific tool typically does not have a complete view over  hybrid infrastructures, or is focused on one direction (for example, security or cost optimization). Also, while they are offering recommendations and suggestions, the users typically need to perform the remediation on their own, which includes searching for the correct tools and finding the best strategies.

To bring the recommendations and remediation experience to the new level, we introduced the new Insights functionality.  It aggregates data  from the native cloud providers, adds the findings by third-party integrations and own tools, and returns the unified, structured recommendations to Maestro users. Not only as a "theoretical" observation, but accompanied by the "Fix It" button.

As a result, Maestro gets a strong update as infrastructure review and analytics tool, and you can find out more in this blog post.  

Maestro FinOps

FinOps opportunities for multi- and hybrid cloud infrastructures was one of the most demanded subjects - both on the market in general and by our users (see the beginning-of-the-year overview here).

This is why a big part of our effort was paid here, and Maestro FinOps capabilities were significantly improved on all levels - APIs, core functionality, UI, and reports.

The most important updates included:

• The introduction of the multi-layered Schedules pyramid, lifecycle schedules and schedules priorities to enable more precise and flexible automated infrastructure state management, resulting in higher cost effectiveness of the infrastructure.
• The enablement of all-resource inventory, providing the clear view of the whole infrastructure content, and giving unified basic control over the detected resources (info check, tagging, security check. Specific attention and extra management possibilities were paid to volumes, SSH keys, and Kubernetes Cluster management.
• The implementation of the enterprise view at the costs and infrastructure, with the yearly reports, infrastructure analytics reports, costs radar - empower the generic view over the corporate cloud infrastructure and allow you to make strategic decisions

Maestro Security and Compliance

Security and compliance are among the keystones for any enterprise. This applies not only to Cloud and hardware infrastructures, but also to the management tools used to operate them.

Within this year, Maestro passed a powerful transformation and assessment to be officially acknowledged as a platform that an enterprise can rely on.

The security and compliance path included the code security checks, as well as passing the Cloud Security Alliance STAR Level 1 assessment.  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 Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) which describes the controls to be implemented within an offering, the actors that must implement each of them, as well as the place within the cloud supply chain where the control should be implemented.

For more detail, please refer to this blog post.

Maestro Open Stack

Incorporating Open Stack into a product brings various benefits - for the product itself, its owners and users.

Integrating Open Stack components allows to quickly expand the functionality with the demanded features, and benefit from the community expertise. On the other hand, the users get a transparent product, with minimized vendor lock risks, and the necessary features being added much faster that they would be if developed from scratch.

This year, Maestro started its journey in Open Source both ways.

• We carefully investigated which modules, or engines, can be interesting and useful, as well as studied the best practices and experience of other vendors in Open Sourcing. As a result, we highlighted a set of access-related tools (Maestro CLI, SDK, the Unified Terraform provider) to be Open Sourced in the first place. 
• We investigated the Open Source tools available for integration and took those that faced Maestro customers' needs the most.

You can find more details about this year's Open Source updates in this post, as well as by the new Open Source label.

Resolution Time

So, the past year was fruitful, and, traditionally, we expect the upcoming one to be even better. 

Although the final roadmap is not finalized yet, we expect that Maestro development and evolution will match the goals that we put in 2023, as well as the new challenges and expectations of 2024.

Recommendations and analytics, FinOps, containers, marketplaces, security - are among the top subjects we are thinking about.

Keep track of the updates to find out about the new features once they arrive.

Happy New Year, and may Cloud be with you!