Maestro Meets Microservices to Expand its Open Infrastructure Platform

In our previous post, we discovered Maestro as a part of the Open Infrastructure world, as well as its Open Source components and strategy.

However, a modern platform is more than just about infrastructure. To increase efficiency, unification, visibility and control, it is important not only to establish effective infrastructure management, but also to set up control on the application layer.

With the infrastructure layer being often hosted in multi- and hybrid- clouds, Microservices became one of the silver bullets for cloud-based and cloud-native applications within the past years.  They allow to package your applications properly so that they can be hosted on any platform. The parts that cannot be put to this type of architecture, are often re-platformed, or re-architected within the new provider. 

Thus, a modern platform should be capable of both managing Cloud environments and empowering microservice-based applications development, delivery and management.

Keeping the Open Infrastructure principles in mind, we developed a way to get both infrastructure and application layers under control in a unified way – and introduced the integration with KubeRocketCI – an Open Source orchestrated combination of enterprise software engineering methodologies, architectural frameworks, and development processes & tools. The solution is built to synchronize and streamline the enterprise software development processes, and offers out-of-the-box golden path, based on the industry best practices and well-established engineering processes.

Why Build a Platform

The main question before we go on, is – WHY do we need a platform?  Partially, we have already covered this before, but let us go a bit deeper into the detail.

So, the modern businesses, as well as government and social organizations tend to migrate their solutions to Cloud. In most cases, it’s not about migrating a single application – it is about creating a cloud-based information platform, which would allow access to all used providers, integrations with third-party tools and corporate ecosystems, budgeting, security, and assets control. 

Without proper organizing, this migration can lead to creation of a complicated structure, with multiple duplicating functions, decentralized control, and unclear responsibilities.

One can face the need to consider separate infrastructure and application control flows for different cases within the same enterprise, which will increase the load on the teams, the complexity of the enterprise solution, its cost, and effort necessary for their maintenance.

Platform engineering enabled organizing unified centralized access to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures in public clouds and private data centers, and establishing effective tools, integrations and applications control atop the infrastructure. 

This allows to effectively reorganize the enterprise Infrastructure, operations, applications and data management, bringing all controls to a unified entry point. This also allows to create a dedicated team that would be responsible for the platform operation and support, meanwhile allowing the business application teams better concentrate on business goals.

The latest trends and recommendations address the idea to use Open Source offerings where possible, when there is need to omit vendor-lock, enable quick customization and high integrability.  This is especially important for large enterprises and organizations that affect thousands and millions of users, and whose malfunctioning or service interruptions can cause high levels of damage (such as government, social organizations, etc).

And this is how the Open Cloud Management Platform concept was born.

Building an Open Infrastructure Platform

So, a modern platform needs to meet the following requirements:

• Provide control over cloud infrastructures in both public and private clouds.
• Provide control over operational parts
• Provide control over application development and lifecycle
• Enable a single entry point for all layers.
• Follow the unification principles and enable unified management, audit, billing and security assessment.
• Include safe and reliable Open Source components where possible.

Maestro by itself meets these requirements on the infrastructure level. It provides unified approach to working with multiple clouds, and the majority of the infrastructure access tools it uses are put to Open Source.  These are widely used classic open source tools, like Terraform (and we even matched their BSL 1.1 licensing updates), Chef, or Zabbix, the new but verified Open Source tools, introduced recently (EPAM Syndicate RightSizer for ML-empowered infrastructure optimization & EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine for Compliance as Code approach), as well as Maestro own mechanisms that we shared with community to enable transparency and integrability.

 

However, with Maestro only, we cannot cover the microservices and application layer. This is where we came to the integration with KubeRocket CI, that streamlines CI/CD processes, and ensures container, application, and code security and observability. 

Due to Maestro API-first approach and modular architecture, it allows bringing all the controls and tools into one entry point. Here, you can establish unified access to all tools, find all reports, analytics and recommendations

The compliance-as-code approach, enabled by the Syndicate Rule Engine, allows to set up checks not only for standard policies and compliance packs, but also for corporate- or state-specific rules and regulations. 

Maestro Open Cloud Management Platform in Brief

Maestro Open Cloud Management Platform appeared as a response to the need for an efficient solution that would allow unified access to multiple clouds, including both pubic and private ones, as well as cover application layer, typically based on microservices, 

It’s architecture and design are aimed to dramatically simplify review, management, budgeting, and security assessments, while modular API-first approach and Open Source usage strategy make it applicable for a large scope of use cases, covering private, public, and government sectors.