Imagine cooking a complex gourmet meal for a large dinner party. You have all the ingredients, but organizing, prepping, and ensuring each dish comes out perfectly at the right time is overwhelming. Now, what if you had a kitchen assistant that could automate the entire process, ensuring every dish is cooked to perfection and served on time? That's precisely what Demostar does for cloud environments—simplifying, automating, and optimizing the deployment and management process.
Demostar offers Environment as a Service (EaaS), a platform designed to eliminate the complexity of deploying and managing cloud environments. Whether it's a demo, training, Proof of Concept (PoC), or even production, Demostar streamlines the entire process, providing a user-friendly interface and robust backend automation.
Traditionally, setting up cloud environments involves multiple tools and extensive knowledge of Terraform, CloudFormation, and cloud networking. This complexity can lead to suboptimal deployments, prolonged sales cycles, and heavy reliance on product teams. The need for a more straightforward, consistent, and scalable solution is evident.
Demostar addresses these challenges by providing:
Using Terraform, Demostar ensures that every environment is deployed consistently and adheres to best practices. By maintaining a Terraform workspace, human error is minimized, and deployments are predictable and repeatable.
Demostar leverages Terraform’s parameterization capabilities, allowing for extensive customization of environments. Every configuration value can be a variable, making it easy to track and manage changes.
Demostar provides detailed cost estimations based on the configuration of Terraform workspaces. This helps both internal teams and customers manage cloud spend effectively.
With Terraform’s declarative nature, documenting changes and configurations is straightforward. Demostar can enumerate tasks and changes without altering the environment, ensuring accurate and up-to-date documentation.
By integrating multiple automation tools into a cohesive workflow, Demostar simplifies the deployment process. For example, deploying Cloud Connectors involves acquiring input variables, estimating costs, executing Terraform scripts, and managing the entire lifecycle.
Demostar tracks the lifecycle of each environment, automatically de-provisioning resources after a set period to avoid unnecessary costs. This ensures efficient use of cloud resources and aligns with financial management policies.
In essence, Demostar simplifies and automates cloud operations, making it possible for teams to focus on their core tasks without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. The platform enhances productivity, reduces errors, and ensures consistent, high-quality deployments.
Demostar is turn-key, meaning users don’t need to provide extensive information to get started. The platform uses pre-configured AWS/Azure subscriptions making it easy for even non-customers to evaluate the solution.
Demostar generates a clickable canvas that representing the network topology. Customize it anyway you want, allowing you to communicate your demo and provide convenient access for users. Users can click on icons representing different resources, such as VMs and networks, to get detailed information and access consoles directly.
You can embedd links, videos and other embedded content. Upload files and control access.
In addtion, Demostar is integrated with many popular file formats (SVG, PDF, DOC,PPTX). You can include placeholders in those files that are replaced with information from a wide range of sources. Data from the demo, configured resources, API's, resource pools and vaults and more.
Demostar can work with the usual cloud providers, Terraform, Docker, Ansible, Python, all your favorites. It also works with Private clouds, Linux based, VMWare, and others.
Physical hardware and staff timeslots can be managed. It's user friendly while providing deep customiziation for innovative and remarkable applications.
Users can save and share their customized topologies, making it easy to replicate and deploy consistent environments. This feature is particularly useful for demonstrations, labs, and PoCs. Shared topologies can also be a valuable resource for training and onboarding new team members, providing them with ready-made, proven configurations.
Built with the flexibility of Open Source, Demostar can extend to any Terraform provider, Container system, and a host of others. It is adaptable your needs. The platform supportes self-hosted/private systems ensuring tight integration and control. This means that whether you are using AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or even a combination of these, Demostar can handle your needs.
Administrators can create pre-canned environments that users can provision on-demand. These environments simplify running PoCs, labs, or demonstrations. Admins can also set which variables users are prompted for, such as AWS/Azure region, availability zone, and access keys, making the platform flexible and user-friendly.
Demostar is designed to scale both vertically and horizontally. The platform can handle large-scale deployments by leveraging Django’s robust infrastructure, ensuring reliable performance and high availability. The initial system design supports very large-scale traffic, similar to platforms like Instagram and YouTube, ensuring that as your needs grow, Demostar can scale with you.
The infrastructure comprises several components:
The platform's N+1 redundancy design ensures that any infrastructure VM can be shut down, upgraded, or backed up without interrupting users, providing high availability and reliability.
Demostar provides detailed reporting on cloud spend, usage, and performance. This includes daily/monthly spend, organization/user count, and active bookings. These insights help in managing costs and optimizing resource usage.
Metrics collected include:
By providing these insights, Demostar helps organizations make informed decisions about resource allocation and cost management.
Demostar directs users to a front-end interface where they can create new environments, update profiles, and manage existing deployments. Sensitive data is stored securely using symmetric encryption, ensuring that API and SSH keys, passwords, and other configuration data are protected.
Users can easily provision new environments by creating a recipe through the intuitive UI, and leveraging other great tools. Demostar orchestrates everything for you, deploying the environment according to best practices and providing the user with access information once the environment is ready.
Users can pre-populate variables in an Order/Recipe, for example, cloud provider credentials, api and public keys. Varibles can be connected to the user’s profile, streamlining deployment process, data-entry is so boring!
Administrators have access to a comprehensive admin screen for managing topologies, bookings, users, and platform settings. This ensures efficient administration and customization of the platform.
Staff can view/update orders, change schedule, review the logs and console recordings. Advanced tools are available that track your user engement. Think of all juicy reports you can share with your team and management. Full "session-replay" is availble, please contact us for more information.
Admins can manage and customize Recipes through the a GUI Editor, which includes settings, budget, access control, supporting documentation, and so much more.
When creating new users, admins can specify roles and profile values used in environment creation. This includes setting permissions, roles, and organizational memberships, ensuring that users have the appropriate access and capabilities. Nested groups can be configured. Users can be part of your organization, or external.
Demostar’s EaaS platform is like a master chef in the cloud kitchen, taking care of all the complexities of environment deployment and management. By automating processes, ensuring consistency, and providing a user-friendly interface, Demostar empowers teams to focus on their core tasks without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
So, why wait? Let us help you better manage your cloud environments and enjoy a hassle-free experience.
