Deliver well-managed cloud applications through continuous discovery, visibility and automated classifications

Discovery and full visibility into cloud footprint is key to classification of resources, and a prerequisite for well-managed cloud applications. Well-managed cloud applications are fundamental to secure, compliant and cost-efficient cloud operations. Traditional discovery and inventory for discovering and managing IT footprint are time consuming and often get outdated as applications evolve. In this blog, Sri Santhanam explains how you can follow the best practices to a delivering well-managed cloud applications and efficient cloud operations, by instantly and continuously discovering all your AWS resources across accounts and regions, in just a few clicks.

 – Sabrinath Rao

Foundation to Well-Managed Applications

Continuous visibility and appropriate classification of AWS resources can be challenging task to keep up. Organizations that achieve this are better positioned to deliver on busines goals. We believe cloud resources should not only be automatically discovered and classified, but teams should be able to view them in the context of their business needs to deliver secure, compliant, and cost-effective cloud operations. With MontyCloud DAY2™ you can:

• Instantly and continuously discover all your provisioned resources across AWS accounts and regions
• Visualize your resources in the context of AWS CloudFormation (CFN) stacks, Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) or Tag key/value pairs
• Discover untagged resources and bring them into business and application context in just a few clicks
• Create well-managed applications from any combination of discovered resources

Traditional discovery exercises are expensive and provide only a point in time view

The simplest of AWS applications usually has tens of Amazon EC2 instances, one or more instances of Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Network Load Balancers, encapsulated into Amazon VPC and are often dynamic. Most customers have hundreds of such applications in two or more accounts, and across two or more regions for redundancy. Modern server-less and containerized workloads can include 100s of resources that are hard to track and manage, Whether you are deploying a new application or you would like to manage your existing AWS footprint, resource sprawl over time leads to security and cost challenges and result in operation inefficiencies.

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

As with one of our early customers a leading online pharmacy that had thousands of resources spread across sixteen accounts. They were hit with cost over runs, with their AWS spend growing 30% year over year.  We started their transition to well-managed applications, saving over $300K annually, by getting the visibility they lacked before.

Discovery, inventory, classification, organization in the business and application context along with continuous visibility can be  transformative to how you make decisions.

Continuous discovery and automatic classification enable informed decisions

DAY2™ Discovery and Classification enables customers to instantly discover, inventory, classify and organize your AWS resources. Unlike other inventory tools that provide a point in time view, DAY2™ continuously discovers resources in the connected accounts. This means as you provision new applications using DAY2™ Blueprints, the application and its resources are instantly discovered, visible and manageable. Similarly, for application’s managed by DAY™, the changes are instantly visible.

Now, with DAY2™, you can connect as many accounts as you have and in just a few clicks you can

• Discover thousands of resources across all your accounts
• Automatically classify your resources based on resource types, CFN stacks, VPC boundaries, and tag key/value pair groupings
• Manage tags for individual or group of resources
• Visualize architecture layout of the resources and its relationships

You can view your discovered resources by three filters:

Tags: Key Value Pairs

You can view your resources by their tagged key/value pairs. From this tag view, you can also organize your resources in the context of your application or any other business context. With a growing set of resources, things can get quickly out of control so this view helps find the resources say for example by cost center or compliance policy. In addition, you can also use the “Tag Resources” action to apply customized tags to the groups of resources or individual resources.

Untagged Resources Insights

You can view untagged resources, and classify them to suit your business context needs

AWS CloudFormation Stack

You can classify all your resources that are created from CFN templates, categorize and view them by each CFN stack.

Virtual Private Cloud

You can view of all your VPC’s across all your AWS accounts. Classify all your resources based on their VPC boundaries. Visualize the resources that are currently provisioned and their architecture layout within each VPC boundary.

Creating Well-Managed Applications is the next logical step

Continuous discovery, classification and visualization are only the first steps. They help move from a world of disparate cloud resources to a manageable foundation. I will show how easy it is to get here with DAY2™ in my OpsTalk™ podcast. You can get started now for free by signing into MontyCloud DAY2™.

The next step is to create a well-managed application so you can truly focus on automating routine tasks, monitor resources, define and enforce server state, and deliver compliance. In my next blog, I will discuss how to create an application with your resources.