As organizations increasingly rely on multi-cloud environments and a diverse array of SaaS tools, the need for comprehensive visibility and control over cloud assets has never been more pressing. But one key area that’s in dire need of better visibility and control is one that’s often overlooked, or simply an afterthought that becomes top-of-mind only after disaster has struck.
Change management and rollback for disaster recovery.
What do you do if you need to find a specific asset that’s been deleted, and fast? What if you’ve been testing a new configuration and found that it increased your costs, or even harmed your cloud performance?
You’ll need to revert back to a previous configuration quickly, whether that’s to restore service or to manage those growing costs.
For a faster and smarter way to take back control of change management across your cloud, you lean on Firefly's groundbreaking feature: Asset Mutations (previously called Asset History).
Transforming Cloud Configuration Management with Asset Mutations
We often see permutations or changes to cloud assets happen, and they’re not inherently bad. But sometimes, a change or permutation is harmful, and needs to be rolled back in order to maintain security in your cloud.
To address the challenges that come up in these instances, Firefly launched a feature called Asset Mutations: allowing users to monitor any alteration in cloud and Kubernetes configurations with unprecedented granularity and ease.
This means platform engineers are empowered to take control and make the most of:
- Real-Time Change Tracking: To capture every configuration change across multi-cloud environments, Kubernetes clusters, and supported SaaS tools.
- Comprehensive Timelines: To view a detailed history of all modifications, providing a clear audit trail for compliance and troubleshooting.
- Diff Comparisons: To easily compare current and previous revisions to pinpoint exact changes, similar to reviewing code changes in Git.
- Rollback and Restore Capabilities: To quickly revert unwanted changes, minimizing downtime and reducing the risk of configuration-related incidents.
- Enhanced Troubleshooting: To identify the root cause of issues by correlating problems with recent configuration changes.
By providing a comprehensive view of changes across multiple cloud providers (including AWS, GCP, and Azure), Kubernetes environments, and critical SaaS applications like Datadog and Okta, Firefly empowers engineers to maintain consistency and enforce best practices across the entire technology stack.
Asset Mutations is a feature that’s now a key contributor to that success.
Disaster Recovery Made Simple: The How and Why
Taking advantage of Firefly’s Asset Mutations is key to disaster recovery (DR) preparedness.
By continuously tracking all configuration changes, Firefly ensures that your cloud accounts are inherently DR-ready from the moment of integration.
In the event of an incident, teams can quickly:
- Identify recent changes that may have contributed to the issue
- Restore previous configurations with confidence
- Minimize downtime and data loss by rapidly reverting to a known-good state
This capability transforms the traditional approach to DR, making it an integral part of day-to-day operations rather than a separate, often neglected process.
With our new Event Center, Firefly can provide a timeline-based view of cloud changes, so you see your complete, chronological asset history plus any asset mutations that have occurred.
The Firefly Advantage: Complete Coverage, Total Compliance
What sets Firefly's Asset Mutations apart is its unparalleled breadth of coverage. While other solutions may offer change tracking for specific environments, Firefly provides a unified view across:
- Multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and multiple accounts
- Kubernetes clusters
- A wide range of SaaS tools
All in one single pane.
This holistic approach ensures that no change goes unnoticed, regardless of where it occurs in your technology ecosystem.
Plus, Asset Mutations aligns perfectly with industry best practices for cloud governance and compliance. By providing a detailed, immutable record of all configuration changes, it helps organizations:
- Meet audit requirements with ease
- Enforce change management policies
- Identify and remediate unauthorized modifications
- Maintain a consistent and secure cloud environment
Ushering in a New Era of CloudOps with Firefly
Configurations in cloud assets change for many reasons. As a matter of fact, you can make configuration changes for even unmanaged resources through ClickOps in your cloud provider’s web UI. You can also make those same changes in codified infrastructure, if you're trying to update or improve your code. No matter what causes the change, however, Firefly is the tool that keeps you confident you’re ready to manage them as they come.
Firefly's Asset Mutations feature represents a significant leap forward in cloud asset management. By offering never-before-seen visibility, control, and disaster recovery capabilities, it empowers CloudOps and platform engineering teams to operate with greater confidence and efficiency. This shift in how they work could bring disaster recovery to the forefront of how cloud practitioners think about comprehensive cloud asset management: a level of prioritization that’s been missing and long overdue.
And as cloud environments continue to grow in complexity, tools like Asset Mutations will become not just advantageous, but indispensable, for organizations seeking to maintain control, ensure compliance, and drive innovation in their cloud operations.
→ To learn how Asset Mutations work within Firefly, watch the step-by-step demonstration, including tips from Firefly’s Customer Success Manager, Frank Weissman. (Hint: he suggests you filter your assets by any affected location, owner, type, or tag group. The more you can filter your affected area, the faster you can revise your configuration).
→ To explore on your own time, Try Firefly for yourself (and even play around in a sandbox environment freely).
