S01: E03 – DAY2 Discovery & Classification

Rick: Visibility into your AWS footprint is indispensable to good decision making. It is the foundation on which you build secure, compliant, and cost-effective applications, efficiently. It takes the continuous discovery of provisioned resources, inventory across accounts, architecture visualization, and classification in your business context.

I’m Rick Hebly. Joining me for this episode of OpsTalk is MontyCloud product manager Sri Santhanam. She’ll show and tell how you can start to make informed decisions with continuous discovery and classification. Welcome Sri, good to have you.

Sri: Thanks for having me Rick, it is great to be here! Unlike traditional discovery exercises that are often manual, time consuming, expensive and providing only point in time view. Montycloud’s DAY2™platform instantly and continuously discovers cloud resources across your footprint. Then you can visualize and classify for true insight!

It takes just 5 clicks to connect your AWS accounts to DAY2. After that, DAY2 automatically discover all your cloud resources and gets you full visibility into your footprint.

Rick: That’s a good problem to solve and a quick way to solve it. I’m excited to see what you’ve built with the team.

Sri: Sure Rick. A leading online pharmacy we work with were suffering from cost-overruns among other cloudops inefficiencies. We started their transition to well-managed applications, saving over $300K annually, by getting the visibility they lacked before. I’ll show how you too.. can instantly discover and classify your AWS resources across accounts through three different contexts for classification such as CloudFormation stack, tags and by VPC.

For the purpose of this demo, I have already connected multiple AWS accounts into MontyCloud DAY2. Now I am going to show onboarding of another account, selecting the department that it belong, configuring the AWS access, and selecting the two regions that I would like to connect to DAY2. as you can see, we have discovered 100s of resources instantly.

Now , In this view I can see multiple resource types that have been discovered, the count and the specific resources within that type. As an example, if I click the compute instance icon over here, I can see all the servers discovered in my cloud footprint.

DAY2 has not only discovered all these resource types, but I also get classification, the key thing I want to share more about today.

Let’s start with my favorite view, I am picking VPC in this drop down and DAY2 instantly shows me all the VPCs in my footprint. Within each VPC, I can see which resources are currently provisioned and the VPC architecture visualization that tie them together.

Let me go back, because next, I would like to view my resources differently, by tag, using key/value pairs, giving me greater flexibility. With a growing set of resources, things can get quickly out of control so this view helps me find the resources that I care for ..say for example by cost center or compliance policy.

Rick: If I may interrupt for just a sec Sri. There’s no way to discount the value for tagged resources, but what if they’re not?

Sri: Good question Rick, the untagged resource view over here helps me identify which resources are untagged. In one-click I can find those, simply select “Tag resources” action and apply the tags to better organize them based on my business requirements. Did I answer your question?

Rick: You’ve absolutely clarified it!

 Sri: Lastly, its the CloudFormation view. In this view, I can see all the resources that are created by Cloud formation Stacks, categorized under each stack. As an example, I will click the Elasticsearch stack here. Now I can easily see all resources within this view….

Before we wrap up, let me show one more powerful feature that I love… Let’s create an application out of this stack. I can do that “easily” by selecting “Create application” action here, follow this simple wizard to create a well-managed application.

Rick: With a well-managed application, you move well beyond insight and into best practice operations from day to day. Am I right?

Sri: Yes! Discovery, classification and visualization are only first steps. They help move from a world of disparate cloud resources, into the world of well managed applications. Now I can truly focus on automating and auditing routine tasks and monitor resources. I can do things like define and enforce server state, and deliver compliance. I would love to show this in a future episode of OpsTalk.

Rick: Thank for the demo Sri! Indeed we’d love to have you back. To summarize today’s items, you’re tackling discovery and classification across three contexts.

1. Across deployments, by the CloudFormation stacks aligned with app or departments
2. Across tags, giving you any desirable view provided by custom key/value pairs, and,
3. Across VPC, especially relevant where CloudFormation Stacks or tags weren’t there yet.

Now customers can confidently take the next step towards well-managed applications. Create application, apply tagging, automate tasks, monitor apps, secure access, analyze cost and automate compliance.

Stay tuned for the next episode of OpsTalk