Maestro Blog

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...

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 . Kee...

The Cloud migration and adoption keeps on being a hot topic for modern businesses scaling from start-ups to multi-national corporations. The scope of Cloud usage grows dramatically, and, meanwhile, grow the complexity of requirements, expectations, and the resulting infrastructures. Moreover, typically, more than one cloud provider is used, which leads to introducing various services, tools, offerings, and integrations that may differ significantly in usage approaches and procedures. This gives extra complexity, as calls for the need to build an approach when all elements act as a single effective eco-system. This is where the Platform Engineering concept comes from. It focuses on designing, building and maintaining platforms or frameworks aimed at supporting applications development and deployment. When it comes to Cloud Migration and adoption, a Platform is a resulting structure that connects all elements, atop which a cloud infrastructure is built. It is aimed to ena...

Maestro was initially crafted as a hybrid cloud management solution. It enables managing both private and public clouds in a unified way, retrieving analytics for utilization, expenses, and security, and supports the establishment of automated workflows for DevOps. Recently, there has been an increasing demand for migration from on-premise VMware-based data centers to public clouds . Below, we give an answer to the question: How Maestro can facilitate such migrations ? The "Six R's of Cloud Migration" Nowadays, cloud experts highlight the "Six R's of Cloud Migration", or migration strategies: Rehosting (Lift and Shift) : Moving an application and its associated data to the cloud without making any changes to the application itself. Replatforming : Making minimal changes to the application to optimize it for the cloud, such as changing the database or middleware. Repurchasing : Replacing an existing application with a cloud-native...

New trends keep on hitting the Cloud Market, caused by both changes in infrastructure creation approaches, and enterprises' aim to make the infrastructures more effective - in performance, and from the financial point of view. While communicating to project teams and customers, Maestro team has collected a set of typical questions, and we decided to aggregate the answers in a series of two blog posts. And we would like to start with the questions, related to one of the hottest topics now - Maestro as a Service integration and Management Platform.  1. How should a SIAM model from your point of view look like? SIAM is a framework needed to manage multiple service providers and their services effectively, in a unified manner, by incorporating them into a single platform.  Maestro as a SIAM framework allows arranging effective operation and infrastructure services for an enterprise.  It has an API-first approach which allows both effective adding new own components, as well ...

The year of 2023 is only started, but it is already highly important in cloud industry. According to numerous reviews and reports, the number of businesses hosting their infrastructures in Cloud is growing dramatically, and in this respect, multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures are the main trend. Each cloud provider gives a vide set of services, that are often alike across vendors. However, there are special offerings not available at competitors, or the specifics of performance or configuration. That is why many businesses end up with a multi-cloud environment. For example, AWS has a very powerful Machine Learning services set that meets the expectations in models training, once Azure provides the effective identity services (like Azure AD). There are still many businesses engaging clouds built within private data centres. There are numerous reasons for that – from compliance requirements to just historical development. If the business is relatively young and was initially cloud-b...

2021 has just ended, and it was a year full of changes, challenges, and victories, for the whole technical world, and for Maestro, of course.  Following the main technical trends, industry expectations and its initial roadmap, Maestro has faced numerous significant updates and improvements and got to a new level in different directions. Those, who have been with us for a while, are already acquainted with the numerous improvements and new features in security , audit , hybridization , and billing , which were delivered in 2021. If you only start investigating Maestro, follow the links to find the posts describing the most important features of the past year. Now, when 2022 has already come into it’s rights, it’s high time to reveal our New Year’s resolution and highlight our main goals and directions for the next 52 weeks. Hybridization  According to Flexera's State of the Cloud report , “COVID-19 accelerates cloud plans and spend as more organizations adopt multi-cloud strate...

Maestro is a solution that allows users to create, manage, control, and monitor virtual infrastructures across public and private clouds in terms of self-service, with the minimum interaction with the IT operations teams. Maestro v.3.37 includes the integration with Nutanix, new functionalities for VMware and vSphere, and the ground changes in Maestro CLI among other important updates. Integration with Nutanix Maestro enables effective, unified, and controllable self-service access to hybrid virtual infrastructures, based on both public and private clouds. It includes a wide range of virtualization and analytic tools enabling high transparency, accountability, and pro-active optimization for resources in cloud. In terms of integration with Maestro, Nutanix will obtain a limited scope of functionality currently available for private clouds. Nutanix is a cloud provider that has a high potential in terms of being used by many customers. Managing Nutanix instances In terms of the initial ...

Regardless of which cloud provider you choose and what your development and production processes are, it is crucial to have an understandable and manageable tool to control the costs of your cloud infrastructure. This is especially true if you have resources in different cloud providers and run between the tasks to get the optimal system and to keep your chargeback as low as possible. Native Cloud Budget APIs All public cloud providers have their own budgeting solutions that allow keeping records and maintaining costs of your resources located on their servers. However, all of these solutions are cloud-dependent and even though they are optimized for the definite provider, they usually differ in terms of logics, behavior, and UI representation: AWS Budgets allow setting custom budgets and track costs and usage in many use cases – from the simplest and most ordinary to the most complex and challenging ones. AWS Budgets functionality supports different types of alerts and notifi...