AutoCloud Presents at Finovate Fall 2023

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Finovate is the world's premier Fintech showcase conference. Companies perform live, 7-minute demos of their technology, focused on the unique needs of enterprises operating in highly regulated industries. In this demo, Evelyn & Tyson showcase AutoCloud's brand new IaC Blueprint builder. With the UI builder, we're supercharged the Blueprint creation process, allowing you to create blueprints without writing HCL.

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Full Transcript

Hey everyone, my name is Tyson Kunovsky and I’m the CEO of AutoCloud. And I’m Evelyn LaTour and I’m our chief product officer.

After spending years in the trenches leading cloud migrations for banks, our team has built a cloud development platform that helps companies in regulated industries decrease the time it takes to get their applications running on the cloud down from weeks or months to just a few minutes.

And in 2023 every company should be leveraging the cloud to stay competitive, but it’s impossible to do without the right expertise. Hiring and retaining good cloud engineers is difficult and expensive, and they quickly become bottlenecks for software delivery since they’re so overworked

Because of this, you need the right tooling in place to support them and multiply their efforts.

So today, we’re going to demonstrate how AutoCloud can help your team get products to market up to 70% faster, with fewer security mistakes, and lower cloud costs by empowering your developers to easily generate Infrastructure as Code, regardless of cloud expertise. Let’s take a look at how it works.

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Let’s say that I’m a cloud engineer at a regional bank called Finovate Bank. Before AutoCloud, I was constantly bogged down with requests for cloud services by developers.

But with AutoCloud, I’ve centralized all of my expertise by creating a catalog of cloud workload blueprints. So now anyone at my company can use these to deploy services without bothering me or my ops team, and I can sleep well at night knowing they’re secure and properly configured.

Let’s say that Tyson’s an application developer at our bank, and he’s built an AI-powered customer intelligence platform for targeting users with a new credit card offering.

We don’t have a blueprint for this yet, so let’s see how easy it is to make one.

I’ll click on “new blueprint”. I’ll select AWS as our provider since that’s where we typically host our apps. Then, I’ll provide a name and description which will help users like Tyson understand what this blueprint is for. 

Next, I’ll decide which cloud services should be a part of this blueprint by selecting the appropriate Terraform modules. We can pull from AutoCloud’s marketplace or I can select the modules from our company’s github repository. 

I know that we’ll want to use Amazon’s Elastic Container Service to host an app like this, so I’m going to add the modules that I know are necessary, so whoever uses this blueprint doesn’t need to worry that anything’s missing.

Now I’ve got the three modules I need, so we can move on and configure how Tyson will be able to customize this Blueprint with a form. We can update the descriptions that help him understand how to fill out specific variables, provide default values, and even add validations to make sure what he deploys is in line with all our policies.

We can also choose whether or not we want to allow him to edit certain variables, so that he doesn’t accidentally create security vulnerabilities. 

I go through the same process for the next two modules, and for the sake of time I’ll simply accept the default settings. Now all I need to do is publish this blueprint so that Tyson has access to it in our company’s IaC Catalog

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So Evelyn, just to recap you’ve given me, the app developer the ability to take my AI application and put it on AWS by myself, without messing anything up, all without bothering you?

Yep, that’s right. I’ve set sensible defaults and abstracted away all of the complexity that you don’t need to worry about.

Awesome! Let’s go use it. Ok, so here I am in AutoCloud with the Blueprints I have access to. Here’s the one that Evelyn just published for my AI app. Let’s use it to get my app to the cloud. Ok, so as we can see, there are only a handful of fields for me to fill out. In fact, it looks like all I need to do is select an environment - we’ll stick with non-prod. And let’s enter a name, which will be ai-customer-app. Ok, looks good, I’ll click next here. If I’m curious, I can now review all of the configurations, and if this looks good which it does, then I’ll click the submit button.

Under the hood, all of the best practices that we as a company have about compliance, security, and governance are applied and the code is automatically generated for me, and shipped to the right place so it can be deployed to the cloud. And as we can see we have a pull request with Infrastructure as Code ready to be deployed.

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Great, now Tyson has deployed a new application with best practices via Infrastructure as Code (or IaC).  Unfortunately, the rest of our public cloud assets weren’t created in this way. They were manually provisioned so they aren’t being tracked with IaC. However, with AutoCloud’s Reverse Terraform feature, we can fix this by instantly codifying our existing cloud assets.

Here’s how it work. AutoCloud has scanned all of our live cloud resources and displayed them here. We can see their IaC status so we know which resources weren’t created in the proper way. We can also see security and compliance issues that we might want to fix before codifying them.

Tyson can simply select whatever cloud resources that were not created with IaC. Then, he clicks `Generate Terraform`, and all those resources are instantly codified and ready to be checked into source control.

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OK, so to recap Evelyn, without Reverse Terraform, your entire ops team would be spending thousands of hours writing code to manually convert these existing cloud resources into Infrastructure as Code. 

That’s right - with AutoCloud it now takes one person a few minutes to achieve the same outcome.

Amazing. And in the last 7 minutes, we’ve also created a brand new, Infrastructure as Code Blueprint that eliminates the possibility of security mistakes, and decreases our time to market down from weeks or months to just a few minutes, in order to save us as a Regional Bank, approximately 50 thousand dollars of development cost.

These tools also ensure that we can properly scale cloud usage within our organization while avoiding common mistakes like security misconfigurations, wasted cloud spend from unused resources, and manual provisioning that slows delivery and destroys visibility.

So that’s AutoCloud. Once again, I’m Evelyn LaTour here with Tyson Kunovsky. Come see us at our booth if you’d like to learn more.