Cloudunity Brings the Community

Last updated on January 25th, 2024 at 1:50pm

Late in 2019 we began crafting our budget for events. One of these events was to be a mid-year, in-person gathering of our customers and partners. Obviously, lives and plans were disrupted early in 2020.

While nothing truly replaces meeting in person, technology today helps us achieve the next best thing. We pivoted to a shorter, virtual event and Cloudunity was born. (Kudos to Mena, our ace designer, for name and logo.)

When we started developing cloudtamer.io in 2016, we felt the cloud could be simpler: not just through use of our software but through the collective knowledge and experience gained by users of our software. Cloudunity is the cloudtamer.io user community, but we think it's much more.

We often see a customer solve a problem in the cloud and know others could benefit from the solution. So our goal for this event was simple: provide the community with learning options and a way to connect with a peer that may help on the journey in the cloud.

Cloudunity is the cloudtamer.io community of cloud professionals unified by their desire to solve tough challenges in the simplest possible way.

Recapping a Boatload of What's New

The mid-year timing of Cloudunity was ideal to reflect on what's been released since January. Our release pace is pretty brisk, so customers have many new features to digest. We consolidated some release news to provide a recap. Here are just a few of the highlights.

Azure Enhancements

Pretty much all of our releases continue to build on our support for Azure. So far this year, we've introduced the following new capabilities for our customers using Azure:

• Resource group management
• Support for additional partitions
• The ability to load existing Azure policies and roles
• Support for multi- and nested-management groups
• Azure account cache support

cloudtamer.io now provides faster customization with ARM template support, so you can:

• Quickly build out standard infrastructure within subscriptions
• Build functionality once and deploy it many times

More Spend Reporting

Recent enhancements in our spend reporting make it easier to:

• View your financial data broken down by total project spend, spend by service, spend by account, or spend by cloud provider at all levels of your cloud topology
• Identify patterns in spending and isolate the variables that impact your monthly bills
• Compare your actual spending with your forecasted spending so you can see where your predictions were right (or wrong!)

Continuous Compliance

The biggest what's-new highlight was our announcement of our continuous compliance features. Our latest release builds on cloudtamer.io's existing proactive functionality to add detect, report, and remediate capabilities.

You can see continuous compliance in action in this replay of our 30-minute webinar.

Learning More and Staying Current

We have comprehensive help content for all of these recent enhancements at our Support Center. You'll find Getting Started and Administrator Guides, screencasts, FAQs, and more to help you get the most out of cloudtamer.io. Not to mention the ability to submit an issue and a feature request, of course.

To stay up to date on new features coming the rest of this year, you can subscribe to our release notes on the Support Center, as well.

The Art of the Possible

Many organizations use an IT service management solution (ITSM) to provide access to technology to their employees. So, there's a natural 'better together' path for organizations to take that pairs ITSM with access to the cloud. ServiceNow is a popular ITSM solution within our customer base. We've helped integrate the ServiceNow request and approval process with cloudtamer.io to automate provisioning of compliant accounts with budget control included. During Cloudunity, we gave attendees a look at that integration.

Tips and Best Practices

Before our team members were cloud tamers, many were practitioners in the field encountering the challenges our customers face on a regular basis. They bring a real-world approach to tackling visibility, control, and management issues in the cloud. So, it wasn't a surprise that our breakout sessions covering life after onboarding and governance best practices were popular sessions during Cloudunity.

Version Control Your IAM Policies and CloudFormation

Our new Repo Module makes it simple to have consistent configuration management across AWS IAM policies, AWS CloudFormation Templates, and cloudtamer.io Cloud Rules and Cloud Access Roles.

The Repo Module can be added to a CI/CD pipeline to support your own workflows. You can set approvers in your merge request workflows and have an easily auditable list of changes that the Repo Module will apply for you. The Repo Module interacts with the cloudtamer.io public API under the hood so you can use those same APIs in your workflows as well.

Think Boundaries, Not Roadblocks

Governance should be boundaries for how to operate in the cloud, not roadblocks to operating in the cloud. This tendency to get in the way of agility and innovation is what AWS calls the 'guardians at the gate' anti-pattern.

Automated governance helps you remove roadblocks and free teams for innovation.

Worried about rogue accounts being created? Automate with inherited policies in cloudtamer.io and get the confidence that new accounts spun up will be compliant.

Concerned that users might access native cloud capabilities not approved by your organization's compliance regimes? Prevent non-compliance with cloud rules that specify the services and resources permitted for use within AWS and Azure.

Giving Back and Moving Forward

We pledged to give back to the community for each attendee at the event. We donated almost $1K to World Central Kitchen, the organization founded by chef José Andrés, for their COVID-19 Food Relief effort.

For early-bird registrants, we sent out these - hot off the press and the first of what we hope are many apparel items in the Cloudunity line.

Customers and partners can watch the replays of all sessions on our YouTube channel.

We're already planning our next virtual event for later this year. Want to join the Cloudunity club to get access to future events? Contact us to chat about your cloud governance needs.