Maestro Blog

The rapid adoption of AI workloads into core applications and internal operational workflows introduces major governance and financial challenges. These include unmonitored compute consumption, fragmented provider tooling, and spiraling "Shadow AI" expenses. An organization that doesn't u nderstand its AI usage granularly enough is at serious risk of efficiency loss and unchecked operational costs. They need a Cloud Management Platform not only to understand "classic" service utilization, but also to provide real-time visibility into token usage and GPU utilization. To meet these modern demands, Maestro is evolving into an Infrastructure Orchestrator and Platform Engineering Hub built specifically to govern the emerging "Neocloud" reality (according to the roadmap we shared earlier). With the new capabilities, Maestro extends its FinOps, security, and orchestration engines directly to LLM usage by applying two new approaches: Treating a cus...

Modern cloud architectures are highly complex. They rely on thousands of resources spread across multiple providers, nested business units, and teams. At this scale, finding cost anomalies is only half the battle. The real challenge is communicating these issues efficiently to enable quick investigation and pro-active remediation actions, where necessary. As we discussed earlier ( No User is an Island: Cooperate to Win ), effective cloud management requires establishing effective and informative contact between FinOps analysts, platform engineers, and business leaders. That created a solid background for building a culture of collaborative approach to cloud control. Today, we are introducing the logical evolution of that vision. The newly updated Radar raises deep, context-aware collaboration from account to enterprise level by transforming it from a personal monitoring tool into an interactive, team-driven platform. Building a Collaboration Bridge on Enterprise Sca...

Selecting a new solution for an enterprise is a complicated decision that grounds on numerous parameters. This especially applies to selecting a cloud management platform, as it significantly affects the major part of the corporate lifestyle, including financial, operational, security, and technological aspects. Today, we introduce a new post in our "Top 5 Questions" series and will give answers to the top questions a CFO may ask before Maestro is introduced to their infrastructure. 1. How does Maestro move us from 'Cost Tracking' to 'Unit Economics'? 2. What are the 'Time-to-Value', ROI, and the Guaranteed Savings? 3. How will Maestro help us govern the 'Shadow AI' spend and GPU volatility? 4. Can Maestro act as a 'Single Source of Truth' for our ERP and ESG reporting? 5. How Maestro can be used to optimize operational expenses? 1. How does Maestro move us from 'Cost Tracking' to '...

Managing cloud costs effectively becomes increasingly important, as cloud services usage grows, with public cloud spending expected to reach $805 billion by 2025. Cloud cost optimization involves controlling spending to maximize efficiency and value from investments. The Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report shows that 75% of organizations report increased cloud waste, with about 32% of budgets underutilized. This highlights challenges in visibility and resource management. Adopting best practices in cloud cost management is vital for companies to efficiently streamline and control their cloud expenses. In this blog post, we would like to summarize the recent Top Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices article, and highlight how Maestro, and the tools it is integrated with, help with the challenge. What is Cloud Cost Optimization? Cloud cost optimization is the practice of reducing overall cloud spending by identifying mismanaged resources, eliminating waste, and effici...

Maestro billing engine allows transforming virtual and hardware capacities utilization into bills , based on the events within their timeline, and states they get as a result of such events However, the modern world, with its dynamic changes in situations and requests, needs flexibility – and in billing, as well. The hourly cost of your datacenter maintenance may depend on external factors, like varying electricity costs (for example, cheaper night hours), which can let you make nightly hours of your infrastructure usage be also more affordable. You may also want to re-distribute the load between data centers or data center sections during peak hours by offering lower prices in underutilized zones, and higher prices – in those that are overloaded. Season discounts, special offerings, and other pricing alterations are also on the list. You even may want to apply extra charges for your users access to public clouds, by adding a respective coefficient to the native provi...

Typically, for on-premises infrastructures, the enterprises use capacity quotas to regulate the amount of resources each team can use (in CPUs, Memory GBs, storage GBs, etc.). This approach is effective and convenient when all your resources are exclusively in your own data centers. However, the things get more complicated when a public cloud is added. In such case, using both the resource-based approach in your private DC, and public clouds' pay-as-you-go, you need to make an extra effort to properly arrange your financial procedures and planning, as, in fact, you need to deal with two completely different calculation approaches. A pay-as-you-go approach for private data centers is a right decision if you aim to unify and simplify financial governance, planning, resource allocation and utilization accountability. An effective, powerful, and flexible billing engine is a keystone for such solution. Maestro has one, and further in this post, we will uncover the appr...

Reporting is one of Maestro's key features, which turns a wide set of its tools and capabilities into a convenient information delivery process. Maestro financial and analytic reports are initially designed to face users with the different types of tasks and levels of responsibility.  We have already described some of the reporting features in the articles like  Maestro Reports for Cost Analytics and Optimization  or  Size-based approach to cloud infrastructure analytics , as well as you can find related posts by FinOps and Analytics labels.  Today, we would like to uncover a couple of new features, that enforce significantly the enterprise-level dimension of Maestro reporting: a set of C-Level infrastructure and costs reports, and the new concept - "Linked accounts" which allows you to build a more effective infrastructure hierarchy within your organization. Linked Accounts: Improved Accountability Traditionally, there was the case when one project owned one ...

Maestro has typically paid lots of attention to virtual instances as the main type of resources to focus on.  However, this approach was applicable when the majority of projects used Infrastructure as code approach. Now, when infrastructures rely more on platform services and cloud native approaches, it became clear that we need to support more details and resources.  We faced the user's need to focus on analyzing usage of specific services, by supporting the inventory and reporting for all of them. Thus, Maestro Management tab now includes the All Resources mode where you can review not only virtual instances, but also resources belonging to any other service used within your account. By clicking a specific resource you can not only see its detailed information, but also perform basic actions such as manage tags or assess the resource security. In addition, Maestro got an extra power and ability in managing Kubernetes clusters, SSH keys, and storage volumes. Managing Kuberne...

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 value of proper scheduling is hard to underestimate. With modern enterprises having hundreds of instances across multiple clouds, arranging proper scheduling requires specific attention. This applies both to organizing the infrastructure and creating an effective scheduling plan. Some time ago , we spoke about the basics of the scheduling approaches and the ways Maestro supports them. Today, we are going to look into the latest improvements in the scheduling offering which bring the whole experience to a completely new level. Before going on, you can find a brief video overview of the Scheduling mechanism in a video below: Schedule types: What's the issue? Effective infrastructure management needs you to arrange the proper resource sorting. This can be based on the environment type (env, prod, QA, etc), affected user teams (marketing, development, DevOps, etc), geography, etc. This is where using tags and splitting resources across different regions or clouds wo...

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 f...

Building effective communication is a keystone for arranging effective and transparent infrastructure management. The user needs to know a lot: from the status of the specific freshly run instance to global costs trends, security issues, and access requests. So, building a dialog actually needs several steps to be performed: Collecting the necessary data (collecting performance metrics, collecting data from integrated tools, building analytics) Establishing communication (deciding on the type of notifications to be sent, and their content) Building communication strategy (identifying the most effective way to deliver the content without spamming or overloading the users with the information). So how does Maestro face this? Collecting data is more of a technical question, which depends on the abilities of the in-built engines and integrated tools. Deciding on communication means is the next step which needs us to analyze the scope of the retrieved information, the recipient groups, and ...