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Cloud Resource Inventory: One Tab to View them All

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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...

Maestro Security: a New Star on the Cloud Sky

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There are various assessment and audit services that let providers prove their offerings are safe and won’t bring a Trojan horse into a customer’s enterprise citadel. Among them, the Cloud Security Alliance stands out. This is a world’s leading organization dedicated to establishing and promoting security best practices for Cloud computing environments. One of the CSA activities is the creation and support for the STAR (the Security, Trust, Assurance, and Risk) Registry – a one that docments the security and privacy controls provided by cloud computing offerings. And we are glad to announce that Maestro has just reached the Level 1 within the program, thus proofed its maturity and reliability. You can find the Maestro listing on the CSA STAR Registry page . What does this mean, practically? STAR level 1 means that Maestro team has passed the self-assessment by filling the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) to verify that Maestro is compliant with the CSA Clo...

Maestro and BSL 1.1 license for HashiCorp Terraform

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The news that HashiCorp switches its Terraform license from the Mozilla open source Mozilla Public License (MPL) v2. 0 to Business Source License stirred up the technical society across the globe. It’s no wonder, as Terraform has become an integral part of numerous businesses ecosystems and infrastructures, and the BSL license restricts using Terraform for creating commercial products, unless a separate agreement is mage. Terraform is also an important part of Maestro Infrastructure as Code engine, and it’s high time to clarify: how does the new Terraform Licensing affect Maestro customers.   What is BSL 1.1 License for Terraform? You can find the full license text   and the detailed FAQ on the official HashiCorp website, However, here is a brief summary: You can use Terraform for free for non-commercial (internal and personal) usage and need an additional agreement for production usage. For integration partners that build integrations with HashiCorp products, inclu...

Maestro Open Source: Two-Way Street to Community

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Open Sourcing has become an integral part of the engineering community. Both using Open Source tools and publishing your own solution may bring benefit to a product, once done wisely. Using Open Source tools allows project teams to empower their products by specific well-tested functions, reducing development costs and taking the best of the community expertise. Publishing own solution brings more attention to the product, enriches it with the fresh ideas and solutions resulting from collaboration with the community, and builds trust due to the product transparency and minimization of the vendor lock. Several months ago, Maestro started it's own Open Source journey, and the road goes into both these directions. Maestro to Open Source With its modular architecture, Maestro is convenient for sharing specific engines and solutions with the community. We carefully investigated which modules, or engines, can be interesting and useful, as well as studied the best practices and experience...

Top 5 Questions About Maestro for CFO: Automation and Multi-Partners Finance

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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...

Top 5 Questions About Maestro for CTO: Service Integration and Management

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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 ...

Maestro as a Service Platform: The New View of the Enterprise Infrastructure

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In the modern world, the application focused on meeting enterprise business needs are widely accompanied by additional tools and services. They are aimed to support the business applications’ performance, reliability, and security, as they enable necessary processes, such as logging, monitoring, load balancing, auto-scaling, cost allocation, etc. When a business needs a pack of applications, each application needs a similar set of supporting tools. In such cases, the number of tools and services that perform similar tasks grows dramatically across the whole infrastructure.  This especially relates to the cases when different teams create, use, and control different applications. As a result, the overall enterprise infrastructure becomes overloaded by duplicating items, which leads to extra costs and extra effort for supporting the whole set. Additionally, the applications management, audit and health check is initially decentralized, which also gives extra load for the team, and p...