Maestro Blog

You already know that Maestro is full of useful tools and possibilities. With this post, we are glad to introduce a pack of useful features and updates that improve user's experience in: Events audit Regions, keys, and storage management Tagging Security audit Understanding Maestro via its documentation Audit Tab We support an audit event logging as an instrument that enables transparency in a distributed company with a distributed structure and allows to find root causes of the issues. With this release, we are glad to introduce the Audit tab in Maestro which shows all the events related to the specified tenant and region. On the Audit tab, you can review the audit events in a table (A) and list (B) view. We also enabled sorting events by categories (C) . Besides, you can use the search to find specific events (F) . Clicking on an event (D) in the list or in the table navigates you to the content view (E) where you can see events related (G) to the instance associate...

In this article, we would like to introduce Chef, an automation tool integrated with Maestro, that allows us to set up and configure the necessary infrastructure components quickly and change the configuration if needed.   Thus, Chef can substantively simplify the process of configuring typical infrastructure models, sparing DevOps specialists' time and efforts on the project. How does Chef work? Chef consists of several major components: server, client, roles, cookbooks, recipes, etc. The Chef workstation represents the computer / instance, from which all the work is performed. The workstation is operated by an administrator. The Chef server is a comprehensive product, containing the database, file storage, web server etc. The server is intended to provide instructions to Chef clients who request these instructions. In the beginning, the administrator creates an organization on the Chef server. The authorization to this organization is performed secure...

In this article, we would like to introduce Ansible, an automation tool for provisioning and configuring virtual infrastructures, allowing to install software on virtual machines and manage large clusters of VMs on different cloud providers. In brief, Ansible can easily become an effort-saving alternative to a DevOps engineer. How does Ansible work? Let's take a closer look at how Ansible works. For example, we need to install software on all computers in the office. There are around one hundred computers to be affected, all with the Linux operating system. To perform such a task effectively, the developers came up with the solution - an automation tool called Ansible . This tool is represented by an Ansible node, which does not contain the client-side, i.e., you do not need a client to be installed on instances. The node identifies the necessary computers and installs the required software on them. Such workflow relieves the system administrator of the necessity to ...

We‘ve been continuously upgrading Maestro administration to meet our users’ growing demands and going up with the tides of the continually developing virtual infrastructure solutions. In this release, you can see brief overviews for the most expected improvements of the latest time: Maestro UI redesign We have reviewed the design of the Maestro application to  increase our application’s usability and make the experience of working with Maestro more effortless and intuitively understandable: Navigation restructuring – Rebuilding the Menu to make it minimalistic, intuitive, and recognizable throughout the solution. Introducing Main and sub-menus for easy navigation across functionality (tenant groups and regions). Dashboard focused on User Type – Highlighting three main user types (Sales, Financial, Technical) in the enhanced layout. The respective content is now displayed for each user type. Management page redesign – Improving tabs layout to provide more intuitive an...

Maestro team has been constantly monitoring and carefully analyzing offerings and tendencies of the market. Currently, we have noticed, that Terraform Enterprise became the top and promising solution, being in great demand among virtual infrastructure users. During Maestro earlier and present presales activities, we quite often get questions about how Maestro works with Terraform Enterprise, or whether we have a substitute or replacement of it in our application. What benefits does Maestro have compared to Terraform Enterprise? VCS Connection TFE: VCS connection in Terraform Enterprise allows users to write, version, review, collaborate on code. Automate and trigger runs through the connection between Terraform and major VCS providers. M: Maestro is integrated with GitHub and allows users to work with it as a source for taking Terraform templates . Maestro works not only with a single file but with large amounts of files located in different folders. Folde...

In the first part of this article, we talked about Workspaces, Private Module Registry, and VCS Connections in Terraform Enterprise and Maestro Terraform.  In this part we will proceed, discussing such important features as API Endpoints, Policy as a Code,  Variables, and  Runs and State.  Variables TFE: Granular variables allow easy reuse of code to scale resources, regions, etc. All variables are securely stored and retrieved as needed during the provisioning process. M3: Maestro fully supports working with variables . Needless to say, Terraform templates are impractical if we create them for one-time use. For example, if the template is stored in a GitHub repository, it can be reused by other users. To reuse an existing template, you should set the specific configuration for your environment. Generally, when creating a template it is a best practice to move such a configuration into variables. For example, with variables, we can indicate, the name of...

In the third and the last part of this article, we will talk about Policy Enforcement, Cost Estimation, Notifications, SAML Integration and other functionality without which we cannot imagine handling the virtual infrastructure management routine. Notifications TFE: Triggers external notifications . Provides support of Slack calls and webhooks. M3: Maestro supports the notifications functionality upon different events occurring in the system, such as: Terraform template execution, resources deployment from the Terraform template, running/stopping an instance, etc. We have implemented a set of notifications that is sufficient for working with the Maestro system. Currently, we support emails and push-notifications. The support of other systems can be easily implemented. Terraform Enterprise Provider TFE: Automates workspace provisioning. Presents a Terraform provider that allows flexible workflow and configuration. M3: Maestro  from its side supports the same workflow...