Maestro 2026: Entering the Neocloud

Rapid evolution in IT engineering is changing how modern platforms are built and operated. Today, engineering teams must balance scalability, security, cost efficiency, compliance, and performance—while integrating AI into both user-facing services and internal workflows. This growing complexity is redefining platform and infrastructure engineering, and bringing to life a new concept – Neocloud, focused on provisioning capacities for AI, machine learning and data analytics workload.

In response to these challenges, Maestro takes a major step forward in 2026, evolving into a powerful framework for building complex engineering solutions with modern tooling, AI capabilities, and proven best practices.

Maestro 2026: Build Your AI Platform

In 2026, Maestro evolves into an Infrastructure Orchestrator and Platform Engineering Hub, enabling Autonomous Orchestration across the entire engineering lifecycle.

With AI becoming a core part of modern service provisioning, one of the key challenges for businesses and service providers becomes the need to ensure the capacities and workflows, necessary for AI services development, delivery and usage.

Thus, one of the goals for Maestro is to embrace these changes and ensure effective Neocloud support along with existing and new business features. This change will be grounded in the CNCF Kubernetes AI Conformance Program to ensure that AI models remain fully interoperable and portable across any conformant cloud or on-premises environment.

This shift moves Maestro beyond a traditional CMS focused on monitoring into a standardized framework for "production-ready" AI infrastructure that eliminates vendor lock-in and "walled gardens".

Maestro has powerful capabilities in integration with public and private clouds, top infrastructure creation and management tools, and its own service management and automation possibilities. Within the past 10+ years, Maestro has already proven to be an efficient framework for infrastructure creation and platform development. The planned updates will add new dimensions to provide users with AI-empowered autonomy, inference economy for FinOps, GreenOps awareness and compliance-oriented Cloud sovereignty.

Having this, Maestro will provide a unified and secure foundation for building complex, AI-enabled platforms with GreenOps awareness and compliance-oriented Cloud sovereignty. The Service Catalog and automation mechanisms allow users to build standardized, conformant environments in just a few clicks, using AI to manage and optimize them for maximum financial and operational efficiency.

The yearly roadmap goes into four major directions:

Autonomous FinOps

Effective FinOps creates a solid background for building efficient technical solutions.

In 2026, Maestro will adapt its existing tools, such as budgeting, predictions, financial analytics to the new Neocloud reality, and acquire new features to meet the needs for building modern engineering platforms that engage AI.

It will adopt the FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification) standard, allowing it to ingest and normalize billing data from AWS, Azure, GCP, and even private clouds (OpenStack/VMware) into a single "Unit Economics" view. It will also use AI to perform "self-driving" cost optimizations, such as auto-negotiating reserved instances.

To address the "AI Budget Bleed," Maestro incorporates deep insights into cost allocation for shared GPU infrastructure. Recognizing that dedicated GPUs often suffer from 30-50% underutilization, Maestro implements fractional GPU allocation using Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) and time-slicing.

Autonomous Infrastructure & AI Guardrails

A standout update for Maestro in 2026 will be the ability to manage AI Agents. It will provide "Robot" identities and guardrails that will allow autonomous AI systems to access cloud resources securely without human intervention.

The approach will rely on CNCF Kubernetes AI Conformance Program. By adopting this global technical standard, Maestro ensures that AI workloads—from training to inference—are portable and interoperable across any conformant cluster, effectively eliminating "walled gardens" and vendor lock-in. The platform will utilize Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) and gang scheduling to prevent resource deadlocks, ensuring that distributed training jobs only consume GPU time when all required components are ready to execute. This transition provides engineering teams with a predictable baseline for running complex frameworks reliably across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Platform Engineering & Sovereign Cloud

Maestro will grow as an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that can be deployed on-premise for enterprises that follow strict data residency laws (EU, Middle East) and cannot have their metadata leaving their borders. Due to its architecture specifics, Maestro On-Premise inherits the same functionality scope and power, as the SaaS version, but enables extra compliance and adaptiveness for the needs of a specific enterprise.

Instead of developers opening tickets for specific services or resources, they use Maestro's Service Catalog to deploy "Golden Paths"—pre-configured, compliant, and cost-optimized environments. This enables quick start for new projects, easy updates, and secure scaling.

GreenOps & the "Circular Cloud"

EPAM's Emissions Digital Platform will be integrated into Maestro to enhance sustainability management. The users will get a real-time carbon footprint tracker that assigns a "Green Score" to cloud projects and compares CO₂ impact between public clouds and on-prem workloads. Additionally, Maestro will encourage users to migrate to renewable energy-based data centers, and provide one-click ESG compliance reports aligned with EU CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) requirements.

Thus, Maestro continues to transform IT from a "carbon cost" into a "sustainability asset". By optimizing GPU utilization through the sharing and conformance strategies mentioned above, Maestro reduces the physical hardware footprint required for high-performance workloads, aligning with ESG reporting goals.

Maestro Mission in 2026 and Beyond

Maestro mission and business focus also re-crystalize to reflect the upcoming changes in approaches and vision.

The primary focus goes to multi-cloud medium and large enterprises aiming for modernization, positioning them as the framework's core target customers.

Maestro isn't just about a centralized bill and resource list; it's about providing developers with compliant infrastructure in just a few clicks, while AI agents handle the cost-optimization in the background.

Equipped with the new features of 2026, Maestro covers a range of business tasks, for different types of beneficiaries within your enterprise.

As a strategic next step, Maestro seeks to improve its vendor-neutrality, focusing on offerings that bring maximum benefit to a specific customer based on their current architecture, goals, and long-term expectations. This includes deep analysis of customer workloads and needs, and cross-cloud recommendations that can suggest selecting a new platform if it could be more efficient for the case.

Thus, Maestro becomes the only (that we currently know about) platform that treats your Neocloud infrastructure as a SMART, SOLID and FOCUS-ed compute engine.

In this blog, we will gradually uncover the updates following the roadmap, and give you insights into new solutions, approaches and best practices. Stay tuned!