August Partner SA Highlights: Learn about Freshservice, Fugue, and Zerto!

Each month, our goal is to provide background on a few APN Partner solutions that Partner SA team members want to highlight. You’ll hear from the SAs themselves about what the solution does, and what they find to be interesting about the solution. In July, we told you about Opsee, Splunk, and Twistlock. While we’re admittedly a few days behind for August, we want to make sure we can provide you with an update for both August and September. In this recap, my colleagues Ian Scofield and Juan Villa discuss solutions from APN Technology Partners Freshservice, Fugue, and Zerto.[1]

Gain Additional Visibility into Your AWS Assets with Freshservice

By Ian Scofield

If your organization is taking advantage of the AWS Cloud, you’ll recognize the constant need to stay on top of all your cloud resources. Freshservice, a service desk and IT service management solution, provides a wealth of services such as incident management, a service desk software, change management, and more. Taking these features one step further, Freshservice also ships with AWS integrated right into the service desk configuration management database (CMDB). Manage your AWS resources and other assets throughout their lifecycle from the single window of your service desk.

By integrating your existing AWS account with Freshservice, you can identify questions with your various Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon EBS resources by associating the assets with incidents and vice versa. In addition, you can use Freshservice to help associate costs with different assets, which will help you better track spending and usage.

Through Amazon CloudWatch integration, you don’t have to juggle multiple tools to keep an eye on your cloud assets.  Freshservice helps you to focus in on critical notifications, as well as the ability to handle multiple alarms about your AWS assets within the service desk. You can convert Amazon CloudWatch alerts to Freshservice tickets to help prioritize and automate escalation tasks and to simplify resource tracking and management from a single platform. Freshservice provides efficient incident, asset, and problem management of your cloud resources and services.

You can also watch these videos about integrating your AWS account with Freshservice and using Amazon CloudWatch alerts from the Freshservice desk here. For more information about Freshservice or to try it out, visit https://freshservice.com/.

Fugue – Validate, Build, and Maintain Cloud Workload Infrastructure

By Ian Scofield

If you’re looking for a system that will allow you to focus less on building and maintaining infrastructure and more on your products, you may want to check out Fugue. Deploying and maintaining your cloud infrastructure can be complex, especially at scale or if you have to meet compliance requirements. Fugue helps solve this by validating, building, and maintaining your cloud infrastructure, which allows you to focus on the things that are relevant to your core product or service.

Fugue is described as an “infrastructure-level cloud operation system,” meaning that it allows you to declare your infrastructure in a meaningful and simple way, in addition to ensuring that it stays that way. It reduces deployment failures by allowing you to “compile” your infrastructure to detect any issues or errors in design time, rather than run time. For example, if you declare a VPC with a CIDR block that is too large, compiling your Fugue template will provide you with immediate meaningful feedback (for example, saying your CIDR block doesn’t match the /16-/28 size allowed in a VPC definition), without having to wait for the deployment to be pushed, to fail, and to roll back.

Fugue can leverage libraries that limit the AWS services that a user can interact with. This allows for fine-grained access to satisfy compliance requirements, internal limitations, cost savings, etc.  This allows you to enforce compliance at design time, before any infrastructure is created that would break compliance requirements.

Fugue continuously monitors your infrastructure to ensure that it stays exactly the way you designed it.  For example, if a security group was accidentally opened to the world, Fugue will automatically reconfigure it to its initially prescribed state.  This continuous monitoring and remediation of any modifications can eliminate drift in configuration over time due to manual modifications or other reasons, as well as continuously enforcing compliance requirements.

For a deeper look at how Fugue can improve your development, deployment, and operations  process, visit https://fugue.co/ where you can register for a launch webinar or schedule a demo to see Fugue in action.

Real Time Disaster Recovery of VMware and Hyper-V Clusters with AWS Storage Competency Partner Zerto and AWS

By Juan Villa 

Most of us have heard a horror story or two of system failures and human errors that led to costly, and sometimes irrecoverable, business disasters. When operating business critical workloads, there’s nothing more important than an effective Disaster Recovery strategy.

Does your business or organization run critical workloads on a VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machine cluster? If so, have you heard of Zerto’s Virtual Replication product with support for AWS as a target recovery site?

APN Partner Zerto, also an AWS Storage Competency Partner, provides a solution called Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) that enables a user to setup real-time replication of data between a source site running either vSphere or Hyper-V and the AWS cloud. To accomplish this, Zerto’s Virtual Replication streams data, as it’s being generated at the source site, to the Zerto’s Cloud Appliance (ZCA) running on AWS. The ZCA receives the streaming data and stores it in S3 while keeping a ledger for point-in-time recovery. This real-time replication allows you to achieve an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of seconds, and a full recovery of a large production cluster in less than 1 hour.

One of the benefits of using AWS as a target site for disaster recovery is not having to pay for compute resources until you need them. This can lead to significant cost savings when compared to the traditional model of operating a fully populated data center for the sole purpose of disaster recovery. As a result, using Zerto and AWS in your disaster recovery strategy is both a cost effective and reliable way of mitigating impact to your business or organization in the event of unexpected failure.

For more information on Zerto’s Virtual Replication and Cloud Appliance please visit http://www.zerto.com/.

[1] Please note that these posts are informative in nature, and are not endorsements from AWS of the solutions highlighted, which are built, released, and managed by the third-party.