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Release 3.0: Welcome to Cloud Enablement with Kion

6 min read

Last updated on February 2nd, 2023 at 2:46pm

With our 3.0 release, we have a new name, a new look, a new vision for true cloud enablement, and, as always, new features to simplify cloud complexities.

cloudtamer.io is Now Kion

We Rebranded!

We are excited to share that we are now Kion. Along with the rebrand, we released version 3.0 of our software with a new look and feel, as well as new features to enable you to unlock the full potential of the cloud. Here's more about our rebrand.

What is Cloud Enablement?

The digital cloud has always promoted agility, cost savings, and a lower barrier to entry. Realizing all of these capabilities immediately is challenging, and it certainly takes more than flipping a switch to realize cloud benefits. Since the inception of our software, we’ve helped our customers with common challenges that arise when managing an expanding cloud footprint. There are many different areas we help with: operations, governance, orchestration, automation, etc. These are all just pieces of what we can do. Cloud enablement is about combining all of these pieces to help you get the full value of the cloud.

Where Are We Going?

Our mission has always been to make it easier for our customers in the cloud. With the rebrand, version 3.0 of our product, and our recent Series A, we’re even better positioned to empower you across the enterprise cloud. What can you look forward to in the near future? We have deeper integrations, finer grain controls, and enhanced compatibility in the queue. These recent and upcoming enhancements enable us to bring governance and management together, so we can go beyond them.

New Features

Our New Look

Along with our new name, we also have a new look. We've made updates to colors, charts, buttons, navigation, icons. Just about everything in our application has been polished and shined.

Make the Most of Your Reserved Instances

Reserved instances are a way to purchase the use of AWS resources at a discounted rate. In addition to saving some cash, you are also securing capacity within the availability zone of your choice.

Better hourly rates and reserved capacity? Why wouldn't you purchase reserved instances? The risk with reserved instances is that they are a contract. You have to commit to purchasing those resources for a one-to-three-year term. If you don't use all of the hours you purchased within that term, they are lost.

Kion helps you make the most of your reserved instances by not only showing you exactly how many of your hours you have used, but by also showing you how your reserved instances are utilized across all of your projects and accounts. Beyond tracking usage, we surface the math that goes into calculating reserved instance rates, making it easy to right-size and identify potential savings.

What about that last risk of not actually using all of the hours you purchased? You can create enforcements to alert you when you cross usage thresholds and when expiration dates are coming up, so you can make sure you make the most of everything you paid for.

For more information about using reserved instances with Kion, see our article: AWS Reserved Instances.

Create and Connect Accounts Like Magic

We enable multi-cloud management by helping you manage equivalent functional resources from any cloud provider with the same easy processes. AWS has commercial and GovCloud accounts, Azure has subscriptions and resource groups, Google Cloud has projects. They are generally the same but are spread out over consoles with differing names, parameters, and processes. We bring all of these similar resources together for simple, centralized account management.

Our new account wizard works its magic in the background, so you don’t need to worry about the differences between each account. Whether you want to add AWS accounts, Azure subscriptions, or Google Cloud projects; new accounts or existing accounts; a single account or many; there’s one place to go. The account wizard walks you through creating or connecting any account in 10 steps or less without ever switching consoles.

For more information about adding accounts, see our article: Add an Account.

visual example of how to connect cloud accounts within the Kion platform

Create New Google Cloud Projects

We’ve previously had the ability to add existing Google Cloud projects, but now you can create new Google Cloud projects without ever leaving Kion. Use our new account creation wizard to easily create Google Cloud projects within your existing Google Cloud organization structure in only six steps.

Creating Google Cloud projects in Kion, rather than the Google Cloud portal, means you can attach them to Kion projects during creation, ensuring cloud rules, funding, and cloud access roles are applied as soon as they are created. Alternatively, they can be added to the account cache for staging and added to projects later on. Whether you like to have your resources available immediately in a constant rollout or you like to build everything out in batches, the account wizard has you covered.

For more information about creating Google Cloud Projects in Kion, see our article: Add an Account.

Flexible AWS Federation that Doesn’t Sacrifice Security

We have added the option to manage existing AWS IAM roles in Kion. When you do this, Kion manages the IAM role’s permission boundaries and policies, but not its trust policy. Why not the trust policy? Leaving the trust policy as is means that it can be managed by your third-party identity provider, enabling federation through them instead of Kion.

Let’s talk about how this setup might look. Let’s say I have an IAM role in AWS that is already connected to my identity provider. The authentication works, it has for a long time, and I don’t want to mess with it. However, I want to use Kion as a central point of management for all of my policies and permissions.

I can bring these two solutions together in just two steps. First, I would enable using existing roles in the system settings and add the login URL for my identity provider. Then, I would create a cloud access role to manage the AWS IAM role I already have working with my identity provider.

Now, I can manage the policies and permission boundaries on my AWS IAM role the same way I manage all of my other policies in Kion. To actually federate into an account, I can select the cloud access role in Kion, which takes me to the login URL I added in my system settings, or I can go directly to my third-party identity provider's login. I will have the same policies and permission boundaries using either method.

For more information about managing existing roles for third-party federation, see our article: Add a Cloud Access Role.

That’s Not All!

These are just the highlights! For details on all of our new features, changes, and bug fixes, visit our Support Center.

If you're new to Kion, welcome! You can  schedule a free demo to learn more about our comprehensive cloud enablement software. You can also follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn  for more cloud enablement news.

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