Maestro Blog

In our previous posts, we b riefly introduced   Gartner's Framework for Managing and Optimizing Cots of Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS ,  started the overview of Maestro as a financial governance tool - from the first step, Planning , and proceeded to Tracking and Reducing . Now, we are ready to see how Maestro can be useful in the rest of the steps - Optimization and Evolving. Optimize Once cost and utilization reduction is quite a technical step, the next one, optimization, often needs changes in architecture, so that the applications need less resources for same or even higher performance. These are the decisions that are to be made by project teams. However, Maestro has several features that can help you in defining the direction. Within its Optimization reports, Maestro not only identifies low-utilized resources, but also provides the statistics on existing AWS instances purchase options . This allows you to get another perspective of the infrastructure and use this data w...

In our previous post , we briefly introduced Gartner's Framework for Managing and Optimizing Cots of Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS  and started the overview of Maestro as a financial governance tool - from the first step, Planning. Once planning is completed and the actual infrastructure is deployed to Cloud, it's time to start with the second step - Tracking. Step 2: Track Establishing the visibility of Cloud spending is the next step in our journey. Effective tracking needs effective organization of the costs review and proper reaction to anomalies. Maestro has a big set of cost and performance tracking tools and mechanisms that can be used for costs optimization. Even though Maestro supports different cloud providers, it brings the tenants organization to unified terminology, without breaking the native hierarchy. Any Cloud resource, event, or cost record can be easily detected and identified as that belonging to a specific cloud, tenant and region. This simplifies further r...

Costs management and optimization are one of the keystones for any organization hosting their environment in Cloud. Meanwhile, providing the capability to review, control, and plan Cloud expenses is among the core tasks set for modern Cloud Management Solutions. Gartner has developed a Guidance Framework which describes in detail the steps, tools and procedures to be used for Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS costs management and optimization. One of the core ideas is that cost optimization is the task and priority set not only for one dedicated department – this is a common goal that can be reached by effective collaboration of different teams within a single organization. Thus, it suggests not only focusing on the operational part but also provides recommendations on cost optimization steps that can be made from architecture, governance, application and DevOps perspective. Once each team may have their own toolset used to fulfill the daily tasks, synchronizing all the activities may be...

Costs visibility and optimization is one of Maestro functionality keystones.  We keep on not only developing new features aimed to enhance your experience in this area, but also regularly improve integrations with cloud providers' native tools, Recently, a whole set of AWS networking optimization reports appeared, as well as the possibility to get reports by Cost Objects. Cost and Usage Optimization Report Networking is one of the significant areas in any infrastructure – from the architecture, performance, and costs point of view. If the networking usage is not monitored and optimized properly, large part of high expenses in the tenants can be bound to idle or low utilized network resources that are billed on an hourly basis. AWS workspaces that are used not inline with the plan can also affect the resulting budget. To help Maestro users optimize their infrastructure in AWS, Maestro introduces the new set of Cost and Usage optimization reports. These reports are based on smar...

Currently, the market of cloud management solutions offers numerous options facing multiple cloud management challenges. These offerings are designed to provide customers with single entry points for management, analytics, costs control, and other business and technical goals. These solutions can be facing the needs of financial department, operations, development or other teams, and mainly focus on specific target audience and set of tasks. Initially aiming to resolve its own infrastructure provisioning challenges, EPAM has created a powerful tool – Maestro, which addresses the users of all types, including those, who create, use and pay for the infrastructure. Now, 10 years later, Maestro has successfully expanded its “habitat” from internal corporate area to the product market. However, once it is there, the question arises – why should I, as a customer, chose Maestro among other offerings? We can start playing a marketing game suggesting all types of challenges Maestro can face. Ho...

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 ...

Working with Maestro involves lots of processes and actions. To be in full control of your virtual infrastructures and to be able to plan your further activities based on trends, it is very important to receive timely and detailed information on the state, performance, and costs of your virtual resources. Maestro includes advanced analytics both in Maestro UI and its reporting system. Analytics dashboard Analytics dashboard provides cloud users with the real-time data about their infrastructures and costs. Structurally, the Analytics dashboard is a collection of widgets with relevant data. There are three types of widgets – table for displaying data in the table form, graph for displaying data in the graphical form (for some widgets, you can switch between the two types), and metrics for displaying different metrics. These widgets can be rearranged on the dashboard (with the exception of the fixed ones), added to the dashboard via the Manage widgets wizard. All the graphs have a built-...