Maestro Blog

As we all know, self-service is one of the main focuses of Maestro. For the sake of effective self-service, Maestro supports the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach that allows preparing stack templates and employing these templates when creating new resources. One of the IaC tools taken on board by Maestro is Terraform by HashiCorp – a cross-platform solution that allows managing complex infrastructures hosted in multiple clouds. Why Terraform? Main advantages of Terraform as an IaC tool are wide functionality, cross-platformity, and separated phases of planning and execution that give time and space for the users to review their infrastructure and make them confident in the results. Main strengths of the Terraform solution incorporated by Maestro are Integration with GitHub Catalog of templates Lock the Template option Extended functionality for reviewing stacks These tools and actions are available in both web and mobile versions of Maestro ...

We have been actively improving our Maestro solution in terms of deployment options. Recently we implemented the new functionality supporting private regions in order to complete the Enterprise deployment model , adding the possibility to install Maestro as a private agent in order to manage OpenStack and VMWare private regions, as well as install a refactoring full-functioning version of Maestro application on a single instance within the customers' infrastructure. Thus, the set of SaaS deployment models supported by Maestro is this: Standard deployment model A single-entry point to the unified and simply organized reporting for all customer’s resources across all public clouds they use.  A set of analytics tools for all virtual resources under the customer’s account. This includes analytics on instance and tenant levels.  Quotas management tool, that allows to set up the monthly expense limits for virtual infrastructures and the scenarios for different stages of quo...

Maestro application is being constantly evolving to meet the growing needs of our customers. One of such grand-scale enhancement is the significantly improved layout and performance of the Notifications page. In order to make notifications review and management more convenient and user friendly, as well as to work with letters more effectively, we updated the logic of displaying letters on the Notifications page and added sorting functionality . Such an approach now allows users to perform a more manageable and efficient search for necessary letters. We also reviewed the content of all notifications sent by Maestro, in order to make the provided information transparent and easy-to-use. The updated Notifications page contains the following elements: 1 . Letters are displayed in a Compact View mode, which allows to preview content without opening them. You can approve a required action by clicking the Approve / Reject buttons, review the attachment, and perform bas...

As one of the fundamental Maestro features, we would like to introduce Operation portal , a platform for providing a comfortable and efficient way of managing customers’ infrastructures. The Operation portal was implemented to allow our users to independently manage tenants and tenant groups . Such a comprehensive approach allows us to fundamentally simplify the work of the end-user in managing their infrastructures from the administration perspective. It will also allow the customer administrator to manage tenants and regions not only via the admin CLI but also via the convenient and intuitively understandable web UI . The portal is available for users with customer administrative permissions . The list of respective email addresses should be provided when activating a customer in Maestro. A user with customer administrator permissions will be able to, apart from managing permissions and user groups, perform the following operations: Manage contacts in...

In the near future, our team plans to enter the market with our Maestro solution and start active search for potential customers. It is crucial for us to make this search highest possible while using a minimum of effort from our side as well as from the side of our clients. In order to create a portrait of our potential client, we designed a Survey . It is intended to collect basic information, in order to understand whether we are able to provide a particular customer with those services that are consistent with his business needs. The Survey contains questions of different areas: general information about the potential client’s business ( domain ). questions about cloud providers already used by the client, which relate to the number of existing and regularly deployed resources (which allow us to define the necessary dynamics ). questions regarding costs , as costs are also an additional indicator of the size and capacity of the infrastructure. questions regarding the ...

We continue enhancing the layout of our application in order to provide an intuitively understandable and user-friendly solution. With this release, we implemented several improvements for better interaction between the user and the application, both on web and native applications. Web UI  Manage Volumes wizard - allows increasing the volume of the already created instance. The wizard is available via the Content View section of the selected instance. Note, that the volume size can only be increased.  Login Button  redesigned in order to provide an intuitively understandable and user-friendly way of signing up for the web application.  Localization enhancements for this release include the following:  Improved the metrics description localization on the Home page.  Added the possibility to translate placeholders , which allowed to make the translation more flexible and native sounding.  Implemented the localization f...

Automation services allow Cloud users running instances with pre-installed sets of software, effectively eliminating the need to install and configure software manually. Maestro is now supporting integration with major automation configuration toolsets of Chef, Ansible and Terraform for OpenStack regions. Chef Infra and Client  - Currently, the integration with Chef  in Maestro   is implemented and working in a test mode   on the AWS cloud, supporting Jenkins and Artifactory automation systems.  Terraform for OpenStack regions - Maestro team wrote its own custom Terraform-Provider and now gives users the possibility to work with the provided API so that they can deploy the infrastructure with a single template on any cloud provider supported by Maestro, including the private OpenStack region. Ansible client is used for configuring systems and deploying software , as well as orchestrating more advanced tasks. In Maestro, Ansible clie...