Scalr Review

Build Secure And Compliant  Environments Through Policy Automation

Organizations and enterprises will surely love Scalr as a cloud management solution. This is because it is equipped with features and capabilities that automate the process of creating and enforcing policies to make sure that cloud environments as well as the users that operate them are secured and compliant.

Create Custom Policies Using Scalr’s Policy Engine

Scalr has a feature called Scalr Policy Engine which provides users with the capability to create custom policies that are tailored to different environments. This means staging, production, and testing environments will have their own sets of policies.

Enforce Conditional Policy Guardrails

The Scalr Policy Engine can be used to create and enforce policy guardrails that govern how cloud resources are accessed and utilized, how application lifecycle management tasks are executed, how the platform is integrated with third-party tools, and how cloud spending is managed and controlled.

One example of a policy guardrail is the assigning of tags that include LDAP usernames to all the servers used in the development or testing environments so that the owners of those servers can be tracked. When it comes to application lifecycle management, a policy guardrail can be set up in order for an application to scale up or scale down when the CPU usage reaches a certain percentage level.

If users want to log all provisioning requests to ServiceNow, an integration policy guardrail can be created for such purpose. For the financial aspect of the operation, they can define a policy guardrail to automate the sending of notifications to project leads when the cloud usage or resource consumption has exceeded a certain percentage of the allocated budget. Thus, with Scalr, policy guardrails are set up based on specific conditions.

Role-Based Access Control

As part of its’ security, compliance, and policy engine features and capabilities; Scalr permits the creation of role-based access control policies that define which users can access the environments and the resources associated with them, and what they can do once they are able to access such environments. For instance, the access control policies enforced for new developers are stricter than those implemented for the tenured members of the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. Users can even make changes to security groups if the access control policy allows them to do that. Security groups are sets of policies that are organized and enforced for specific workloads, environments, and conditions.

Contextual Cost Visibility And Control

Another desirable feature offered by Scalr is contextual cost visibility and control. With this feature, users will be able to monitor all aspects of cloud usage, and control and reduce costs through the aid of automated and intelligent workflows. The platform can generate cost and financial reports that give them valuable information on how applications, teams, and projects are consuming cloud resources.

Because Scalr uses contextual data to optimize cost visibility and control, it makes sure that users are able to spot the exact factors that affect cloud spending. Thus, the platform provides detailed financial reports that enable them to identify the root causes of overspending. When it detects that a particular machine is overspending, it will show them which layer or tier in the machine is driving cost.

Translate Insights Into Actions And Reduce Costs

Once users gain contextual insights into cloud spending, they can then translate these insights into actions by creating workflows that enforce financial policy guardrails and aimed at reducing costs, allowing them to maintain the optimal performance of their environments while ensuring that they stay with the budget.

Enable Self-Service For All

Scalr allows enterprises, organizations, and their teams to enable self-service in cloud management. Eliminating red tape and bureaucracy and increasing productivity, both DevOps and CloudOps teams can enjoy a seamless experience using the platform’s self-service capabilities.

The platform’s self-service capabilities are very flexible in such a way that they can accommodate different types of users and environments. Whether users are operating in staging, production, or testing environments; Scalr makes sure that they are able to streamline their tasks without compromising security and compliance.

Role-Based Service Catalogs And Portals

One component of Scalr’s self-service capabilities is its easy-to-use service catalog. Depending on their identity and the environment they are working on, users can access blueprints and other resources that are relevant to them from specific service catalogs. Thus, the service catalogs can be configured in such a way that users are allowed to input only the resources being required by a specific environment. When they need to perform a simple provisioning task, the service catalog is very useful for that kind of job. For complex provisioning tasks, Scalr has a portal called Farm Builder where advanced users can access flexible provisioning options.

Streamline Application Building And Delivery

Scalr is also built with templates which are used for creating complete application stacks and specifying the desired state of applications.Through these templates, developers can set all the needed configurations and definitions of their applications which include images, storage, networking, automation, and auto-scaling. Once they are done creating application stacks, they can then deliver them as catalog items.