We started Stratus Solutions to bring together engineers who were passionate about tackling tough challenges and helping customers achieve their mission. Increasingly, our customers’ missions are taking place in the cloud.
I think the biggest challenge, for government and commercial organizations alike, is governing what we call ‘cloud@scale’ – governing cloud access and the use of cloud resources as an organization moves more workloads to the cloud. Beyond controlling account and resource access, proper governance also encompasses budget enforcement, security, and compliance automation.
Many of our customers have faced this challenge and called on us for help. Seeing a need without a solution, we used lessons learned and governance best practices that large cloud service providers employ to build cloudtamer.io’s cloud@scale management methodology.
Most organizations have entire teams dedicated to creating and configuring new accounts, as well as attempting to manually aggregate account spending. cloudtamer.io uses automation and orchestration, and provides ample visibility to substantially reduce this manual effort to effectively manage cloud@scale.
Initially, we put cloudtamer.io to work as part of a broader cloud-based solution for a large DoD agency. This customer went from decentralized physical data centers for unclassified development and hosting to migrating application development within AWS. While they saw an immediate increase in their ability to build and deploy innovative solutions faster, they also had challenges around timely account provisioning, managing cost in a pay-per-use model, and ensuring their growing cloud environment stayed inside of the prescribed compliance regime.
Through cloudtamer.io, we introduce the concept of hierarchical enforcement of compliance policies to ensure developer accounts are only able to access the services, regions, and resource configurations that meet our customer’s security and compliance standards. This same hierarchical enforcement is implemented on the cost side via spending limits to ensure projects maintain enforceable established budgets.
As an additional bonus, our customer saw increased developer enthusiasm and productivity from facilitating native access to the AWS console and API keys, along with speedier account provisioning.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are some of our other early adopters.
Over the past year, our team of passionate cloudtamer.io engineers has grown to include new members and new disciplines. It’s thanks to this team that we’ve reached this chapter in the cloudtamer.io story: announcing general availability of cloudtamer.io later this month at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC.
Dede is the CEO of Stratus Solutions, the developer of cloudtamer.io.
