Maestro Blog

In our previous posts we have already discussed the details on the financial management tools, by their function on different stages of infrastructure lifecycle (find them here ). We also frequently speak about security , and optimization . Maestro Dashboard is the key entry point for both finding out the data about your infrastructure, and cooperation between teams.It represents the key indicators and findings, each grouped in separate views for your convenience. Here, you can see the general infrastructure statistics, top spendings per cloud, service, or resource type (FinOps); the suggested infrastructure optimization possibilities (Optimization), and the security and compliance statuses (Security). Maestro Dashboard is not only about row data: you can interact with the numbers, call reports, thus receiving more details and diving deeper into investigations of specific cases. You can also adjust the content and look for the Dashboard to better meet your goals,...

Have you ever built a "perfect" dashboard only to realize that no one uses it? Have you spent weeks crafting a detailed report that was supposed to provide your customers with more context, but instead provided your support team with more customers? Most of developers did it, for sure. The question is – how we improve the situation when users tend to skip or misunderstand charts and reports we share with them. Maestro team, together with EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine (SRE) team, developed an interesting solution, based on a simple core idea. The numerous reports, charts, and dashboards should be addressed to the needs of specific user groups. This is how the idea of four-layer reporting was born: Operational level reports – those representing the on the go changes and actions, and making it easy to track specific events and alerts. Project reports – those covering the project-level statistics and allowing to find general project changes, trends, and responsib...

When working with security alerts, teams often focus only on alert severity, but there's another dimension that often gets overlooked: "Remediation Complexity" (RC). Severity tells you what's critical. RC tells you what's actionable. Understanding both is the difference between firefighting alerts and building a truly efficient security posture. Today, we would like to introduce you to a deep dive into understanding remediation complexity, as given by one of Maestro key security expert – Anna Shcherbak. The insights go as two-part series on Anna's Medium blog: Introducing Remediation Complexity . Why this concept is essential for cutting through alert fatigue. The Framework Behind Remediation Complexity A practical "how-to" guide, with the evidence behind our 5-level RC scale and principles for assigning complexity. This framework isn't just theory. This has been built it into the Syndicate Rule Engine that...

As cloud infrastructures grow, they become highly "entangled," making it difficult to detect non-trivial security issues using conventional methods. While standard Cloud Custodian filters excel at evaluating individual resource attributes, they struggle to identify risks defined by these relationships. As a result, the most significant cloud vulnerabilities often emerge not from a single misconfigured entity but from the complex interplay between multiple resources For ensuring security & compliance, Maestro widely engages EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine (SRE), based on the Clou Custodian tool. Dmytro Afanasiev, one of SRE key developers, introduces a concept of generic resource filtering as a first step in complex issues resolution. The key idea is that you can filter resources of one type based on directly related resources of some other type. The relation between them can be inferred by foreign key attributes, so it's quite trivial to implement. In his blog...

Managing security, cost, and compliance in increasingly complex cloud environments is a universal challenge. As organizations scale their cloud infrastructure, the risk of misconfiguration grows, creating vulnerabilities that can lead to cascading failure model where a single misconfiguration can trigger devastating operational, financial, and reputational consequences. Manual governance is no longer a viable strategy for navigating this landscape. Here is where introducing Policy as Code (PaC) is one of the best approaches. It allows organizations to define and manage their governance policies in a codified, human-readable, and automated way. Instead of relying on manual checklists and reviews, PaC translates governance rules into code that can be versioned, tested, and systematically applied across the entire cloud environment . Implementing Policy as Code delivers clear and measurable benefits that strengthen governance across all cloud platforms. These benefits a...

Managing cloud costs effectively becomes increasingly important, as cloud services usage grows, with public cloud spending expected to reach $805 billion by 2025. Cloud cost optimization involves controlling spending to maximize efficiency and value from investments. The Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report shows that 75% of organizations report increased cloud waste, with about 32% of budgets underutilized. This highlights challenges in visibility and resource management. Adopting best practices in cloud cost management is vital for companies to efficiently streamline and control their cloud expenses. In this blog post, we would like to summarize the recent Top Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices article, and highlight how Maestro, and the tools it is integrated with, help with the challenge. What is Cloud Cost Optimization? Cloud cost optimization is the practice of reducing overall cloud spending by identifying mismanaged resources, eliminating waste, and effici...

The Year 2024 is coming to an end, and it's high time to sum up our achievements and future plan in the traditional summary and resolution post. While the Green Dragon is still here, we would like to start with summing up the past 52 weeks, taking the recap of the updates, news, and success cases we had - all that becomes a solid ground for our further movement. 2024: Main Steps and Updates Traditionally, Maestro development was focused on several main directions, as well as included a set of general updates and stabilization changes. General updates and stabilization The updates covering general Maestro performance and core functionality has been taking place throughout the year, with the massive stabilization closer to the end of the year. These included not only performance improvements and bug fixing, but also important new features, such as the possibility to have the ReadOnly access to Maestro, a huge update to C-level, tenant-l...