Maestro Blog

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...

The year is coming to the end, and it's high time for our traditional lookback on Maestro evolution, changes, and important events. The year of 2023 has been dynamic and full of updates, both technical and strategic. We kept to our previous commitments , meanwhile adjusting to the new trends in Cloud and technologies in general. We met our user's expectation and need for cross-cloud FinOps, automated infrastructure analytics, security assessment and the "Fix it" button , aimed to simplify issues remediation. We also took into account the rising demand for Open Stack-based resources, Cloud Native approaches, AI/ML integrations . As a result, we came up with our standard "six release per year" cycle, highlighted with the following milestones: Maestro Insights With the ML technologies growth, the amount of services offering infrastructure recommendations and analytics, grow. This is true for the public cloud providers'...

Having the detailed information about virtual infrastructure "as is" is not enough for effective infrastructure management, financial governance, security assessment, and remediation. In fact, a team can use the raw data, but if it comes to large cross-cloud infrastructures, processing it would take lots of time and effort. This is where automated and ML-empowered analytics comes to the stage. Maestro incorporates an effective approach that lets the user benefit from the analytics and recommendation mechanisms offered by the public cloud providers themselves, as well as from Maestro own tools. The outcome of the analysis are recommendations that can be used to improve virtual infrastructures in different dimensions.  The user can take not a resource-, but a recommendation-oriented view on the infrastructure, with different types of recommendations being addressed to the users with different roles and goals.  For example, security insights are addressed to security experts,...

Reporting is one of Maestro's key features, which turns a wide set of its tools and capabilities into a convenient information delivery process. Maestro financial and analytic reports are initially designed to face users with the different types of tasks and levels of responsibility.  We have already described some of the reporting features in the articles like  Maestro Reports for Cost Analytics and Optimization  or  Size-based approach to cloud infrastructure analytics , as well as you can find related posts by FinOps and Analytics labels.  Today, we would like to uncover a couple of new features, that enforce significantly the enterprise-level dimension of Maestro reporting: a set of C-Level infrastructure and costs reports, and the new concept - "Linked accounts" which allows you to build a more effective infrastructure hierarchy within your organization. Linked Accounts: Improved Accountability Traditionally, there was the case when one project owned one ...

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...