In today's modern business landscape, applications designed to meet enterprise needs are frequently complemented by a myriad of supporting tools and services. These additional components play a crucial role in ensuring the performance, reliability, and security of business applications, facilitating essential functions like logging, monitoring, load balancing, auto-scaling, cost allocation, and more.
When an organization requires a suite of applications, each of these applications demands a similar array of supporting tools. This scenario leads to a proliferation of tools and services that perform similar functions, causing a substantial increase in the complexity of the entire infrastructure. This complexity is particularly pronounced when different teams are responsible for creating, using, and overseeing various applications.
Consequently, the overall enterprise infrastructure becomes burdened by duplicated resources, resulting in unnecessary costs and increased efforts to maintain the entire system. Furthermore, managing applications, conducting audits, and ensuring the health of the applications are initially decentralized, adding extra burdens to teams and creating room for errors.
The Introduction of Shared Services
To address the challenges of decentralized service usage and infrastructure redundancy, a shared services approach can be adopted. This approach entails organizing commonly used services across the entire enterprise, such as logging or auto-scaling, at the enterprise level. These services can then be connected to any applications that require them.
This structural shift results in two distinct layers within the infrastructure: the application layer, which is primarily focused on addressing business needs, and the platform layer, which concentrates on operational and infrastructure services. This strategy not only enhances clarity and control within the enterprise infrastructure but also allows application teams to focus on their core business tasks, while a dedicated team of platform engineers manages the operational and infrastructure services.
Maestro as a Service Platform
Maestro, with its comprehensive features and capabilities, serves as an ideal platform for implementing the shared services approach within an enterprise.
When an organization requires a suite of applications, each of these applications demands a similar array of supporting tools. This scenario leads to a proliferation of tools and services that perform similar functions, causing a substantial increase in the complexity of the entire infrastructure. This complexity is particularly pronounced when different teams are responsible for creating, using, and overseeing various applications.
Consequently, the overall enterprise infrastructure becomes burdened by duplicated resources, resulting in unnecessary costs and increased efforts to maintain the entire system. Furthermore, managing applications, conducting audits, and ensuring the health of the applications are initially decentralized, adding extra burdens to teams and creating room for errors.
The Introduction of Shared Services
To address the challenges of decentralized service usage and infrastructure redundancy, a shared services approach can be adopted. This approach entails organizing commonly used services across the entire enterprise, such as logging or auto-scaling, at the enterprise level. These services can then be connected to any applications that require them.
This structural shift results in two distinct layers within the infrastructure: the application layer, which is primarily focused on addressing business needs, and the platform layer, which concentrates on operational and infrastructure services. This strategy not only enhances clarity and control within the enterprise infrastructure but also allows application teams to focus on their core business tasks, while a dedicated team of platform engineers manages the operational and infrastructure services.
Maestro as a Service Platform
Maestro, with its comprehensive features and capabilities, serves as an ideal platform for implementing the shared services approach within an enterprise.
- Application teams can easily obtain the infrastructure required for their applications, configure it to suit their needs, and efficiently monitor and manage resources using Maestro's intuitive tools.
- Platform engineers can configure a catalog that includes operational software and infrastructure templates using Maestro Infrastructure as Code (integrating Terraform, Azure Bicep, AWS CloudFormation) and automation tools like Ansible and Chef.
- Once an application team has the necessary infrastructure in place, Maestro's built-in services are automatically activated, offering features such as scheduling for infrastructure lifecycle management, cost analytics and optimization across tenants and the entire enterprise, security analytics and recommendations across tenants and the enterprise, and unified audit capabilities for logging and traceability. This approach is highly effective in multi-cloud environments, providing a unified tooling approach for both public cloud providers and private datacenters.