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Overview

Each of the leading cloud platforms has their own established framework for building well-architected applications. Understanding and implementing the best practices needed to align your cloud workloads with these frameworks is key to improving the quality of your applications and maintaining reliable, secure, resilient, cost-efficient, performant, and sustainable cloud infrastructure--as well as ultimately improving overall business success.

The CoreStack Compass product offering is designed to help you adopt best practices, gain continuous visibility, and manage risk for your cloud workloads with assessments, policies, and reports that allow you to review the state of your applications and get a clear understanding of risk trends over time. Further, it automatically discovers issues and provides actionable insights for remediation, simplifying and streamlining the process of assessing, improving, and maintaining your cloud workloads.

Continue reading to get an overview of CoreStack Compass, or click any of the links below to jump to other relevant sections:

• Onboard cloud accounts for Compass
• Setup and manage workloads
• Start your first assessment
• Manage assessments and milestones

How CoreStack supports well-architected frameworks:

CoreStack Compass helps ensure your workloads are optimized as part of a strong cloud strategy in the following key areas:

Automate discovery and remediate at scale

Discovering issues across best practice areas for your cloud workloads can be difficult and time-consuming, which is why CoreStack implements auto-discovery and remediation features. This helps improve your productivity for detecting any issues in your cloud account or workloads and provides those insights for you to look into and remediate at scale.

Collaborate with multiple teams

Gathering information and collecting evidence for best practices can present challenges around collaboration. Since it's usually not a single person doing the assessment, but a group of people across different teams, CoreStack provides built-in collaboration features to make assessing your workloads easier.

Validate across multi-cloud workloads

Chances are most of your workloads are on one cloud, but it's common to have your different workloads spread across multiple or other shared services and resources across other cloud providers. CoreStack helps make it possible to validate best practices across multiple clouds by providing a single pane of glass to do a well-architected review across your diverse workloads. CoreStack also supports a Multi-Cloud Well Architected Framework for workloads that span across more than one cloud providers.

Classify best practices

Cloud best practices can fall into multiple categories. As part of Compass, CoreStack provides built-in pillars respective to each cloud platform (AWS, Azure, etc.) that organize best practices into relevant areas of focus, such as operations, security, sustainability, and more. We include these pillars to helps users clearly define which areas they need to focus on and guide you in terms of next steps to move towards a well-architected cloud infrastructure.

Map policies to your workloads

Best practices for different cloud platforms are reinforced in CoreStack by built-in policies, which are mapped directly to various best practices. These policies help identify any violations in a workload based on a particular best practice. Policies come pre-loaded and pre-mapped, but you can also create and map your own policies. This enables you to validate your workloads against best practices with more ease and control.

Automate best practices

Even with built in best practice classification and policies, validating your workloads against best well-architected frameworks can still require manual work. Thankfully, since CoreStack Compass maps relevant policies to identify violations against certain best practice, you can automate most of the work needed to validate your workloads and identify any violations, reducing the amount of overhead and effort needed on your part as a user.

Built-in suggestions for remediation

For many of CoreStack's automated policies, any identified violations that appear as part of an assessment will come with a suggested remediation to address it. These suggestions appear directly to the user in the CoreStack web portal, making it easy to both find and fix any issues with your cloud workloads.

Built-in evidence tracking

Keeping track of what steps were taken to implement best practices and address any violations is a key part of the cloud optimization process. CoreStack Compass helps simplify and streamline this part of the process by providing built-in comment and file attachment features for each best practice item included in an assessment. Users can add evidence directly in the assessment to show what was done to meet certain best practices, as well as create a milestone once an assessment is complete to log a snapshot of a workload that can be referenced later.

Clear assessment workflow

Progress through assessments with ease with a built-in workflow that helps you ensure you follow each step of the assessment process and account for each best practice item along the way. In CoreStack Compass, it's easy and straightforward to start an assessment, go through the questions, remediate any violations it finds, then reach a finishing point where you're ready to create a milestone.

Export assessment reports

In addition to being able to monitor your assessment results directly in the CoreStack web portal, you can also export your results as reports (PDF or image file). This makes it easy to share the results of an assessment with other members of your team, or across departments.

Integrate with AWS Well-Architected (WA)

CoreStack Compass supports one-directional integration with AWS Well-Architected, meaning we can send data directly from CoreStack to AWS. When you complete an assessment, whatever best practices you provide answers can be synced to AWS so that your results show there as well. This is helpful for keeping information consistent across both CoreStack and AWS environments (Note: Data does not yet update from AWS to CoreStack).

Set forth on the path to a well-architected approach

Part of CoreStack's mission is to not only help you with assessing your cloud posture, but to provide a clear path to realizing well-architected workloads. One step is doing an assessment, but there are other mechanisms to help you get there, such as managing budgets and cost. Through our other products -- FinOps, SecOps, and CloudOps -- we lay a path for you to follow that will help lead you towards reaching well-architected across all key areas of your cloud strategy.