5 min read

Q&A on Achieving CloudOps Excellence from the AWS CloudOps Day

On March 16, 2021, Maureen Donlin, Interim Director of Research from St.Louis University (SLU), showcased how they gained 30% in researcher productivity without adding headcount in our first AWS CloudOps Day Webinar. Maureen and her team at SLU enabled their researchers with self-service provisioning of complex High Performance Computing Applications and CloudOps excellence for their IT staff by automating routine tasks with MontyCloud DAY2™.

The webinar is available on-demand. Click here to view

 

During the webinar there were few questions which were of interest to our attendees. I have summarized them here in this blog since it would be of interest to our readers too.

AWS CloudOps Day

ACHIEVE CLOUDOPS EXCELLENCE IN JUST A FEW CLICKS
Q1. Like the Operations-Ready High Performance Computing solution, are there similar solutions in the DAY2™ platform?

Yes! DAY2™ has over 40 such solutions that your teams can instantly leverage. For example, teams can easily spin up Operations-Ready RDS databases that include monitoring and routine automations such as snapshots, backups etc., More sophisticated Operations-Ready templates are available for DynamoDB, RedShift, Elastic Search, EMR, ECS, Fargate, EKS, Kafka and others.
You can setup governance guardrails easily based on your organizational policies. Your teams can spin up environments in a simple self-service portal within a few clicks and save weeks or months of effort.

Q2. How does DAY2™manage the AWS accounts that I connect with your platform?

DAY2™ uses native AWS APIs to connect and perform all operations. It does not use any 3rd party agents or custom agents and is delivered as a SaaS solution. AWS cloud management experts have completed a well-architected review and granted DAY2™ the Cloud Management Tools competency. This means MontyCloud’s DAY2™ solution has been vetted, validated, and verified by the AWS Partner Competency Program.

Q3. Continuous visibility – How often does the DAY2™ discover and show all my account resources?

DAY2™ continuously discovers, inventories, classifies, and organizes all your AWS resources in your connected accounts. Any new resource you add to your account, through DAY2™ or by other means, is instantly discovered by DAY2™. You can view your resources by their tagged key/value pairs, AWS CloudFormation Template or VPC. From this tag view, you can also organize your resources in the context of your application or any other business context, such as department.

You can easily see how your Cloud Operations metrics are trending for security, compliance, cost etc. This view helps you get the right metrics and automation with which you can reduce your Total Cost of CloudOps. Your teams can also receive daily reports on new resources that were added, and other CloudOps metrics.

Q4. What does Operations-Ready provisioning templates mean in DAY2™?

Customers seeking to achieve a standardized cloud operations environment can leverage well architected, Infrastructure as Code (IAC) deployment templates that are available in the DAY2™ platform. DAY2™ includes 40+ Operations-Ready IAC templates to standardize provisioning and CloudOps that can be used from DAY2™ platform. The templates also come pre-loaded with automations for performing routine management tasks on the deployed resources and include monitoring options. This helps customers both standardize their deployments, and readily operate their cloud footprint.

Q5. What are some examples of the Operations-Ready templates available in MontyCloud DAY2™?

DAY2™ includes ready to use templates for setting up AWS best practices and guardrails, Private and Public VPCs, VPN, EC2, RDS, Kafka, application infrastructures such as EMR, ECS, EKS, High Performance Computing environments and more. All these templates also include routine tasks and monitoring options that become instantly available after deployment.

Q6. Why should I use the Operations-Ready templates available in DAY2™? Can I bring my own templates?

Yes, you can bring your own templates to provision your AWS environments. These templates will be available in your private resource library alone. DAY2™ recognizes the resources provisioned and enables you to manage the applications or infrastructure deployed through your templates.

Q7. How do I setup deployment guardrails for templates with self-service provision for different users in my organization?

Yes, with DAY2™ Cloud Governance, you can create varying configurations for all templates and publish them to specific users and/or departments. For example, a target AWS region for one department could be different than another (or) a EC2 instance type needs to be different based on target needs. Depending on business needs, you can restrict or give your users flexibility by easily creating deployment guardrail for any configuration parameter for your templates. And further, you can also lock network -related parameters for launch configurations for each AWS account.

Q8. You mentioned custom scripts for remediating security or compliance issues. Do you have any inbuilt remediation workflows which can be used?

DAY2™ has an extensive library of automation tasks for routine operations. Customers can also easily extend the library by importing their own custom automation scripts. DAY2™ CloudOps Automation Rules is a no-code process builder that helps you build your own consistent and timely responses with automated alerting & remediation processes for cloud-based applications. You can set a trigger event and select an automated task from the library to be executed when the trigger condition is met. You can save time and improve application resilience by monitoring what matters, and enable automated responses based on logical sequencing of automated actions.

Q9. How can I share DAY2™ with my team?

You can invite your team mates to help manage your AWS accounts on DAY2™ or set up Slack, Jira or PagerDuty notifications to send real-time notifications back to your team.

Q10. What industry standards do the DAY2™ BOTs run checks against?

The DAY2™ Security BOT improves your security posture by helping you scan for 200+ security best practices and for Industry Security standards such as NIST CSF, NIST SP 800-53, AICPA TSC and ISO/IEC 27001. With built-in policies you also evaluate against AWS security best practices across 72 AWS services. Recommended remediations for issues found by the Security BOT are available in the platform as automated tasks.

The DAY2™ Compliance BOT helps check for 160+ compliance policies that helps alignment with Industry compliance standards for NIST 800 171, NYDFS 23, PCI DSS 3.2.1, CMMC, CIS, FedRamp and HIPAA etc. Recommended remediations for issues found by the Compliance BOT are available in the platform as automated tasks.

Q11. How does autonomous CloudOps reduce the Total Cost of Cloud Operations (TCCO) by up to 70%?

Beyond the obvious cloud bill, TCCO includes:

  1. Visibility: Cost over runs due to lack in visibility. (Ex: Up to 1/3rd cloud spend is wasted spend due to lack of visibility and efficient usage).
  2. Talent: Cost arising due to delays associated with finding specialized cloud talent.
  3. Tools: Need for custom tools to enable infrastructure provisioning, security and compliance monitoring, cost management and routine operational automation – All add to additional licensing costs, surface area of maintenance, and propagate the need for more resources.
    • Custom homegrown tooling for cloud operating models. (that add to maintenance burden and the need to continuously keep up with newer services that developers demand).
      Costs adding up because traditional IT operations model or a shadow IT approach causes developers to slow down.

DAY2™ platform makes it easy to address all these issues and provides a No-Code approach to setting up a successful cloud operating model that is built right from the ground up. With just a few clicks, DAY2™ customers can achieve the following.

  • Resource Governance and Optimization – A detailed resource inventory and tagging mechanism helps identify resources within each application. Smart purging across your footprint brings in optimization, secures your resources, in turn saving costs.
  • Cost Optimization – Intelligent cost optimization coupled with granular expense tracking on resources results in saved infrastructure costs.
  • Operational automation – Well Architected blueprints enable self-service across your team and drives down time spent on transactional tasks. It improves team agility and in turn brings in scale and cost benefits.

If you have any questions just drop a comment here and we can add them to this growing list.

And, if you are excited to try out how MontyCloud DAY2™ can help you achieve excellence in CloudOps and save up to 70% on your Total Cost of Cloud Operations, click to Try for Free.

We have extended our trial period for an extra 7 days only for this week! Don’t miss out!

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