There are many cloud management tools on the market today, but not all of them are created equal. In this article, we’ll explore some of the top cloud management tools and how they compare to one another.
Ansible
Ansible is a simple, powerful and agentless IT automation engine that enables you to manage and configure your infrastructure in a fast, secure and reliable way.
Ansible runs on all major operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS) with minimal dependencies. It uses SSH by default as its transport layer protocol but can also communicate using WinRM or other transport protocols such as RDP or VNC. Ansible is agentless which means it doesn’t require any software to be installed on the managed nodes unlike Puppet and Chef do.
Puppet
Puppet Enterprise is a complete IT automation solution in a single product. Puppet helps you define the state of system configurations and then automatically enforce them. It manages your code and configuration files, as well as the software on your servers, workstations and devices. The result is that you can scale your infrastructure effectively while decreasing errors, improving security and saving time.
Puppet uses a declarative language to describe system configuration: think of it like an easy-to-understand programming language for humans with no knowledge of computer science or software development—you just describe how you want things to be configured.
SaltStack
SaltStack is an open source software platform for remote execution, cloud configuration management and event-driven automation. SaltStack is written in Python and uses ZeroMQ for inter-process communications.
Salt is a tool that can be used to control:
- All the machines in your infrastructure
- The configuration of those machines
- A set of credentials for those machines
OpenStack
OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. It’s primarily used for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).
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OpenStack is easy to install, operate and scale, thus allowing you to focus more on your business than on maintaining your own data center infrastructure.
OpenStack provides enterprises with the tools they need to manage their own private cloud environments while giving them access to apps that run on top of it like OpenShift or Kubernetes.
Cloudify
Cloudify is a platform for deploying and managing applications on any cloud or datacenter. It automates the management of complex applications across hybrid clouds, private clouds and public clouds like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, VMware vSphere (ESXi/vCenter), OpenStack and more.
Cloudify transforms your DevOps processes by making it possible to deploy workloads in seconds rather than hours or days; automate scaling of resources at runtime; provision new instances on-demand in response to demand spikes; manage large numbers of instances across multiple data centers with ease; ensure compliance with governance policies while minimizing security risk through role-based access control (RBAC); audit resource usage per user or application — all using an agentless architecture that can be installed on any machine where the code is executed.
Cloudera Manager
Cloudera Manager—like other cloud management tools—helps to manage Hadoop clusters. It can manage clusters of any size and even multiple clusters at once, making it an ideal candidate for managing your entire organization’s data processing infrastructure.
Cloudera Manager provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that makes it easy to monitor the health of your cluster and its services, as well as perform basic maintenance tasks such as restarting jobs or modifying job configurations.
Conclusion
There are many more options for cloud management tools out there, but these are some of our favorite choices. We hope that this list helps you to find the right tool for your needs!
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