2 June 2023

Feature Focus: Custom Cloud Service Recommendations

In the realm of software development, harnessing the power of the Cloud has become a cornerstone for modern applications. CAST Highlight has released a new capability giving users more flexibility to define Cloud native service recommendations for their applications. With the introduction of Custom Cloud Service Recommendations, you now can manually pick and add platform-specific Cloud native services to the list of automatically recommended services for an application. Let’s see how the feature works.

In the dynamic world of Cloud native services, one size does not always fit all. Every application has its unique requirements and considerations, and it’s crucial to have the flexibility to choose the Cloud native services that best align with your specific needs. In addition to code-level insights, intelligent portfolio segmentations, and automated recommendations, CAST Highlight now empowers you to fine-tune your Cloud migration plan by manually incorporating the services of your choice.

By introducing this Custom Cloud Service Recommendation feature, we acknowledge the expertise that many users bring to the table. Software intelligence is a time saver, but often you are the best judge of your application’s requirements, performance goals, and integration needs. With this new feature, you can augment CAST Highlight’s recommendations with your own informed decisions, ensuring a tailor-made cloud architecture that precisely fits your application’s needs, while saving a huge amount of time by letting CAST Highlight recommend the basics in an automated fashion. Let’s see how the feature works in detail.

How to add a custom Cloud service to automated recommendations

As soon as you have scanned an application and submitted the results to CAST Highlight, the Cloud native service recommendations are automatically generated and grouped by Cloud service provider (we currently support AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud). At the application level, you can retrieve them under the Cloud Maturity tab > Recommendations.

To add a custom service recommendation for a specific Cloud platform, select the corresponding platform from the drop-down list and click on the “Add Cloud Service Recommendations” button. A modal opens and lists the different platform-specific services, grouped by service category (Compute, Security & Identity, Analytics, Databases, etc.). Pick the services you want to add to the recommendations by clicking on them and close the modal.

The added services are listed and – since they’ve been manually added – colored in light blue to indicate they are custom. The users who added them are also indicated to ease traceability. These custom services are part of the Cloud Migration Advisor, exports and APIs, and are also consolidated with automated recommendations at the portfolio level.

You changed your mind about an added custom Cloud service after discussing with other people from your team through the Discussion Threads feature? No problem, simply remove the custom recommendation by clicking on the ‘minus’ icon for the corresponding service.

You’re now all set to quickly and accurately tailor the platform-specific services your application will implement when optimizing your applications for the Cloud.