Maestro Blog

According to Gartner , by 2025, over 85% of organizations will embrace the cloud-first principle, and cloud-native architectures and technologies will become an intrinsic part of their digital strategies. To compare with, in 2021, this number was 30% only. The year 2023 brings new trends that reflect this rapid Cloud evolution. AI, Virtual Desktops, Serverless, Automation, Hybrid Cloud are among the top directions, according to most analytics and reviewers. Maestro traditionally responds to the three sources of requirements – stakeholders, market, and end-users experience. This year, the three of them are naturally united, and we came up with a perfect roadmap that will lead our product to a new level of maturity and marketability. Main Directions Among the whole set of things to be done we would like to highlight those that are the most important and promising. One-Click Workspaces/VDI Provisioning on AWS and Azure Virtual workspaces is a highly demanded way to provide secure avai...

Building effective communication is a keystone for arranging effective and transparent infrastructure management. The user needs to know a lot: from the status of the specific freshly run instance to global costs trends, security issues, and access requests. So, building a dialog actually needs several steps to be performed: Collecting the necessary data (collecting performance metrics, collecting data from integrated tools, building analytics) Establishing communication (deciding on the type of notifications to be sent, and their content) Building communication strategy (identifying the most effective way to deliver the content without spamming or overloading the users with the information). So how does Maestro face this? Collecting data is more of a technical question, which depends on the abilities of the in-built engines and integrated tools. Deciding on communication means is the next step which needs us to analyze the scope of the retrieved information, the recipient groups, and ...

Proper organizing data and calls transfer within the IaaC processes is one of the crucial elements of establishing the sufficient level of security within the enterprise. Traditionally, when Maestro users work with Terraform, all templates are stored and processed on Maestro side. However, this approach does not suit when the customer needs the sensitive data be kept within their private secure perimeter. Recently, we introduced a new secure approach to process Terraform templates with the Private Agent. The general idea of the approach is the following. Once you use a native cloud provider for Terraform templates execution, you (before the update was introduced) would pull the git repository and execute Terraform on Maestro side, which may not have direct access to your private cloud and execution would fail. However, now you have an option to choose execution on Maestro Private Agent, which has its own Terraform engine that is used to process the templates, staying within your secure...

Self-service is one of the five keystones for any effective cloud service. This applies not only to the provisioning of services to customers but also to the way the customers organize their internal workflows. An enterprise that does not allow self-service in Cloud for its employees would definitely lose a big part of Cloud benefits, as the operational part will be complicated, slow, and not reactive enough to face the enterprise needs or arising threats properly. However, the question is – when enabling self-service, how to make sure that things don’t go out of control, especially for large teams and infrastructures? Standard Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Typically, cloud providers allow their customers to set up role-based access to infrastructure management. In this approach, possible operations are combined into roles, typically by purpose. The users, in their turn, are combined into user groups, according to the tasks they perform and the access level they need to have. ...

Back in March, we shared an exciting story of creating a POC for a machine-learning-based infrastructure rightsizing mechanism . Naturally, such an interesting initiative and promising results could not be put aside, and we went on working on the tool to see how far we could potentially get, and – of course – if all our work is worth the benefits it could bring. From POC to a Product The initial, POC, version of Maestro Cost Advisor (that’s how we called it) was actually quite a simple one in terms of the functionality: it took the virtual machines performance metrics for 4 days, analyzed the CPU and memory load, the timelines, and suggested the following actions to the instances: Scale up Scale down Shutdown Schedule The mechanism analysed the real load on the instances and suggested new instance types based on the 90’s percentile for each parameter. The approach was good enough to prove that the mechanism would work, but definitely not enough to become a business to...

Typical infrastructure load is not homogenous. There are resources active round the clock, as well as those for which the active time is followed by idle hours. There are regular working hours for the capacities used by the enterprise teams for their daily routines, as well as peaks and dropdowns related to customer activities, Database loads, etc. And the best point here is – once a load variations are regular and predictable, they can be scheduled. Scheduling is quite a simple mechanism allowing you to get your resources turned off automatically when they are not needed, and start them back right before you are going to use them. Unlike auto scaling based on creation and termination of resources depending on the demand, scheduling is targeted to resources that are expected to have longer lifetime. As compared to other FinOps optimization procedures, it takes relatively small effort for implementation and does not bring significant changes into the infrastructure composition – s...

Cloud usage patterns, as well as the request for the specific types of cloud-related expertise, develop in cycles. Initially, the core aim of the cloud management tools was to provide the possibility to perform the basic infrastructure management operations. The ability to create, change and remove resources was enough to meet the majority of technical and business tasks. Still, the more the cloud technology developed, the more complicated the infrastructures became. Additional services arose, bringing more value to the customers, and needing more effort to track them properly.   Does wisdom come extra effort? Eventually, effective infrastructure setup, analytics, management, and optimization turned out to be not a scope for a typical IT department expert, but a set of separate specializations within the Cloud-related community. To be able to perform these operations successfully, and to take best of the cloud-native offerings, you need to spend plenty of time and effort for respec...