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 provides extra space for errors.
Introducing Shared Services
The issue of decentralized services usage and infrastructure overcreation can be resolved by introducing a shared services approach. This means that the services repeatedly used across an enterprise (for example, logging, or auto scaling), instead of being set up for each team separately, are organized on an enterprise level, so that they can be connected to all applications that need them.
Structurally, the infrastructure gets two logical layers – the application one, focused on the business tasks, and the platform one, focusing on operational and infrastructure services.
This approach not only brings more clearance and control to the enterprise infrastructure. It also allows application teams concentrate on facing business tasks, while the operational and infrastructure services are maintained by a dedicated team of platform engineers.
Maestro as a Shared Services Platform
Maestro, with its features and capabilities, becomes a convenient platform for introducing the Shared Services approach to an enterprise.
A. The application teams can get the infrastructure necessary for their applications, configure it properly, monitor and manage the resources using the Maestro tools.
B. The platform engineers can configure the catalog with the operational software and infrastructure templates.
They can do it using Maestro Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Azure Bicep, AWS CloudFormation) and automation (Ansible, Chef) integrations.
C. Once an application team gets the necessary infrastructure, Maestro in-built services are activated automatically, providing:
- Scheduling for infrastructure lifecycle management.
- Costs analytics and optimization across tenants and enterprise.
- Security analytics and recommendations across tenants and enterprise.
- Unified audit for logging and traceability.
All of this effective for multi-cloud environments, providing the unified approach for tooling across both public providers and private datacenters.
In our next blog post, we will concentrate more on Maestro as a Shared Services Platform architecture, usage scenarios and supported services.