Intelligent infrastructure is combining with intelligent applications and changing the business operational model in real time. Transformation can bring huge benefits to businesses and boost the bottom line, but it also requires huge changes in corporate culture, brings complexity in the form of cloud operations, and heightens security issues.

Automating away these complexities and eliminating the friction from cloud operations is the goal of MontyCloud’s DAY2 intelligent cloud management platform.

“What the DAY2 platform that we built does is it up skills our IT teams so that they can deliver what the developers need … to go innovate without running into the common cloud problems, such as cost overruns or security or compliance challenges,” said Venkat Krishnamachari (pictured, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of MontyCloud Inc.

Joining John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio for a special CUBE Conversation as part of theCUBE’s post-show coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data (which was held on March 24), Krishnamachari and Kandice Hendricks (pictured, right), delivery architect at cloud services company GreenPages Inc., gave a “show and tell” session about MontyCloud’s DAY2, with customer use-case examples from GreenPages. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud operations with guardrails

The complexities of cloud arise after day one of digital transformation has settled into ongoing cloud operations, AKA day two.

“Day two operations in the cloud are important for customers who are trying to get self-service provisioning going, standardization going, and to have a way to help their developers move fast on the innovation,” Krishnamachari said.

In a live demonstration on how easy it is to get started, Krishnamachari took just 10 clicks to activate a free trial of DAY2, which is automatically connected to the customer’s Amazon Web Services Inc. account.

“This provides a guarded experience for customers to be able to gain visibility, security, compliance and set up the cloud operations environment,” Krishnamachari said, clicking through screens to set up continuous visibility, security posture, continuous compliance, provisioning and governance, server management, and application management.

DR and compliance bots show benefits of DAY2 automation

Collaborating with MontyCloud has helped GreenPages provide innovative disaster recovery and compliance solutions for its customers. The first use-case example given by Hendricks was to solve cost security compliance standardization across a global AWS environment.

“The challenge with this that we experienced was the complexity of the cloud environment and the size of the environment, and how can they stay compliant, optimize costs and scale?” Hendricks said.

By creating a compliance bot to automate the process, GreenPages was able to parameterize options such as configurable schedules, configurable target servers, departments, choosing between automated and manual remediation processes in compliance, whether that remediation process also auto reboots versus approval based reboots on infrastructure or resources, integrations into a Slack channel for manual remediation approval process, and daily noncompliance reporting.

Joining the compliance bot in automating complex but essential cloud operations is the DR bot. This replicates everything from the production environment in AWS to the DR region in AWS, according to Hendricks.

“So with the pilot light scripting that runs daily through a Lambda function, we can manage those Delta copies into the DR production or the DR region from production and address any changes that may occur in the production environment,” she stated.

While the bots were created for specific customer use cases, both can be ported and variabilized for any AWS environment, according to Hendricks.

“The challenge with cloud operations is there are a lot of moving parts. Our platform can abstract the complexity and put this kind of automation within the reach of customers who are trying to transform their IT departments,” Krishnamachari concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data, including Krishnamachari’s session on how to accelerate digital transformation and simplify AWS with autonomous cloud ops. (* Disclosure: MontyCloud Inc. sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither MontyCloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE