Docs

# Challenges

# Governance

A comprehensive and pervasive understanding and management of risk in your organization. Every member of your tech team needs to be able to assess the potential impact of their actions on the project, tools, or cloud.

  • Organizations

    • If you manage several siloed organizations, Managed Services/Business Unit View is the tool you need. A single central hub allows you to organize these multiple units in the manner that makes the most sense for your team, and then manage them from a streamlined and effective console

  • Permissions and policies

    • Ensure that everybody's privileges are directly related to their job. These features predefine minimal authorization, ensuring governance and providing the precise level of freedom needed by individuals to do their job
    • Those actions can include creating a project, deleting credentials, reading roles, etc., as well as policies that are specific to certain entities
    • Multiple credential support permits the creation of roles with policies for a particular subset based on the industry-standard Open Policy Agent (opens new window) (OPA)

  • Teams + custom roles

    • As you explore Cycloid's tools and capabilities, you will see how easy it is to adhere to the principle of least privilege across all your tech team activities. Cycloid enables you to set the confines and standards (in terms of teams, roles, and policies) you expect your techs team to maintain throughout their dealings with the project

  • InfraPolicies, policy as code

    • Policies that respect the best practices for all cloud resources such as tagging
    • InfraPolicies are a Terraform-based implementation
    • The implementation of InfraPolicies is a combination of OPA and Terraform written in Rego, a language provided by OPA
    • Policies are used to validate infra changes during the terraform plan command. Terraform is not part of the implementation, it's only the target of the policies
    • Policies can be applied to Terraform code in your entire organization
    • Policy as Code offers fine-grained control over modifications to an organization's infrastructures while at the same time defining validation rules. Later, tools like StackForms and TerraCost let you set limits that are automatically deployed, freeing your ops team from having to monitor and preventing unintended issues

  • Enterprise organization + SAAS + on-premises

    • Cycloid's tools can be utilized by any organization, but they offer particular characteristics that make them especially efficient at the enterprise level. The platform can be utilized as a SAAS or on-premise, based on the governance necessities of your organization

  • Connectivity with identity providers

    • Cycloid supports OpenID, SAMLv2, and AzureAD

# Deployment

  • Stack

    • Ensure flexible deployments while maintaining governance with a generic definition that covers infrastructure, configuration management, and pipeline: Terraform, Ansible, and Concourse.
    • Create a catalog of stacks - referred to as catalog repositories - that fit your needs and use them consistently across projects and teams to implement the best practice.
    • Store these catalog repositories on your git repository to gain the benefits of version control like collaboration, change history, and improved existing stacks

  • StackForms

    • Allow users to choose environment variables from a pre-approved list
    • Behind an attractive and easy-to-use dropdown menu that conceals powerful tools offering environment configuration variables that are approved by DevOps engineers and systems architects
    • Enables users to create environments independently while DevOps retains governance and compliance

  • TerraCognita

    • The reverse Terraform, lets you accelerate the adoption of best practice Infrastructure as Code
    • Lets you automatically generate Terraform files from your manually-created infrastructures
    • Save time and maintain best practice when generating infrastructure as code for your existing infrastructures

# Management

  • StackForms

    • Let users safely edit running environments within the limits allowed by your organization

  • InfraView

    • Give up-to-date visibility into your infrastructure so your whole team can see what is going on
    • Provide a visual representation of infrastructure deployed on different environments and check Terraform state information for each resource
    • The aim is simple: build bridges between teams by giving maintenance-free and up-to-date diagrams everyone can understand
    • Centralize most of the information usually found on the cloud provider console

  • TerraCost

    • Estimate the cost of any Terraform defined infrastructure
    • TerraCost automatically gives you insight into the total cost of your deployments before you deploy them and without having to calculate manually
    • Offering visibility, transparency, and governance, it can help both devs and managers
    • TerraCost uses your Terraform plan to output cost of resources and how it changes from one deployment to another

  • CI/CD Pipelines management

    • Centralize all deployments in one tool, easily spot the pipeline and its tasks to help design workflow for everything you want
    • Continuous thing-doer giving a flexible and cross-compatible CI/CD pipeline
    • Pipelines are designed to be self-contained to reduce server-wide configuration. Being portable also lowers risk, allowing projects to more easily recover from CI disasters
    • Orchestrates from your code to infrastructure creation and deployment, taking into account dependencies like notifications, third party monitoring configuration, backup, automatic rollback, etc

  • Logs

    • Display logs of all your environments within existing projects
    • Apply a filter on log groups to show only relevant ones from project and environment names of your stack
    • Allows you to expose a particular pattern or server.
    • Single interface to track multiple environments
    • Get technical details about running projects directly from AWS Cloudwatch Logs (opens new window) or ElasticSearch (opens new window).

  • Events

    • Track all activity in your organization with Cycloid Events
    • Cycloid produces events, such as project creation and pipeline triggers, automatically. If your organization needs more, use our API to generate and send your events
    • Our API allows you to extend this feature and connect third-party software, like your monitoring

  • Credentials

    • Handle and access secrets, credentials and more
    • Use Vault to write infrastructure as code and store "secrets" within Cycloid credentials to avoid specifying them in your source code
    • Vault helps you write infrastructure as code and use "secrets" stored within Cycloid credentials. This is to avoid having to specify any credential inside the source code.
    • Secrets provide secure and transparent handling, centralize valuable information and secrets - such as API keys, cloud credentials/access key, X.509 certificates and SSH credentials - while allowing projects to access them securely through HashiCorp's managed, open-source Vault

# FinOps

  • TerraCost

    • TerraCost automatically provides you with insight into the prior cost and planner cost of your TerraForm-based infrastructure
    • It allows you to see the impact of your change or changes on the price before deploying it
    • Offering visibility, transparency, and governance, thereby helping both developers and managers
    • TerraCost uses your Terraform plan to automatically output the cost of resources and the evolution of the cost from one deployment to the next

  • Cloud Cost Management

    • Cloud Cost Management provides insights into your cloud spending across various cloud providers
    • It gives a broad overview of the cost of your cloud infrastructure over time, such as monthly and yearly costs
    • You can analyze the cost incurred on the cloud in more detail by filtering and grouping by several parameters, and also in custom time ranges
    • The granularity of the report you can choose is either day, week or month
    • You can aggregate the cost of projects across multiple cloud providers by using tags to define projects and environments

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