Cloud computing has revolutionized how businesses operate by providing a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective way to store, manage, and access their data and applications. Cloud Tools are software and services that facilitate working with cloud computing environments. They provide the capabilities for deploying, integrating, securing, automating and managing applications, infrastructure, workflows and resources across public, private and hybrid clouds.

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The list of cloud tools you should use in 2023

Informatica

Informatica provides a cloud-native, vendor-neutral and open data integration platform enabling onboarding and managing data across cloud platforms/on-premises infrastructure. It automates workflow/pipeline execution, offers universal connectivity, graphical designers, and metadata management and ensures governance. 

Features

• Supports scheduling workflows, fault tolerance, retries/rollback capabilities and auditing for all operations.
• Offers an integrative metadata repository, universal connectors, a graphical workflow designer and transformation components.
• Facilitates workflow and pipeline automation while maintaining governance with metadata management, access controls, monitoring and lineage.
• Enables real-time/batch ingestion, transformations, quality checks, governance enforcement and securely moving data between data stores/warehouses.
• Provides pre-built and custom transformations/expressions in a calculator-like interface. Allows graphically chaining steps together across workflows.
• Facilitates scaling integrations with data growth through workload management, activity monitoring and prioritized job scheduling. Offers pay-as-you-go pricing and is optimized for cloud deployments.

Chef

Chef Automates deploying and managing environments at scale using chef-clients, servers and policies. Provides declarative configuration management and the ability to copy exact environments.

Features

• Enables automating and managing infrastructure at scale through configurations and recipes.
• Relies on chef-clients, servers and policies to replicate exact environments across the infrastructure.
• Uses Ruby-based languages (Chef Infra, Chef Habitat) for declarative configuration management and automation.
• Integrates with many cloud platforms and DEVOPS tools and has a large ecosystem of community-built cookbooks.

Puppet

Puppet is a declarative configuration management tool using Puppet agents, masters and modules. Ensures infrastructure is configured properly/uniformly, compliant with standards and optimized for performance, scalability and efficiency.

Features

• Ensures compliance with security/governance standards, scalability, high performance and efficiency.
• Supports diverse operating systems, cloud and virtual platforms with pre-built modules and integrations.
• Centrally manages configurations and policies from Puppet masters to Puppet agents across the infrastructure.
• Provides agent-based configuration management using the Puppet language to declare infrastructure standards and optimizations.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services is a Leading IaaS or infrastructure as a service with pre-built cloud computing services, including computing, networking, storage, databases, analytics, ML and more. Facilitates deploying and scaling resources with ease.

Features

• Offers a broad range of cloud computing services, including EC2 computing, S3 storage, RDS databases, Redshift analytics, EMR Hadoop, and Lambda serverless computing.
• Services are highly scalable, provide high availability and offer pay-as-you-go pricing with no upfront costs or long-term commitments.
• Large partner ecosystem, many pre-built AMIs/templates and deep integration with management/governance tools.
• Supports migrating workloads, building new applications and hosting global internet properties/back-end services.

Sematext

Sematext is a Cloud-based monitoring and log management platform providing deep visibility into infrastructure, applications, customers and key business metrics. Detects anomalies, ensures performance SLAs, optimizes costs and simplifies troubleshooting.

Features

• Provides cloud-native monitoring and log management with agent-less architecture across AWS, Azure and GCP.
• Facilitates visibility into infrastructure, applications, API usage, key metrics, logs, events/pipelines and machine data influencing performance SLAs and costs.
• Offers anomaly detection, advanced analytics, alerts/notifications, centralized reporting and search/query capabilities with no limits on metrics/logs/events.
• Integrates easily with third-party tools for reporting, alerting, machine learning and proactive management regarding workload health, scaling opportunities and optimization/waste reduction.

Lacework

Lacework is a Cloud security posture management platform with machine data and anomaly detection. Continuously monitors for vulnerabilities, threats, misconfigurations, and compliance/regulatory issues impacting AWS, Azure and GCP workloads.

Features

• Delivers cloud workload security and compliance management across major cloud providers and accounts.
• Monitors for vulnerabilities, threats, misconfigurations, permissions issues and non-compliant resources impacting cloud workloads.
• Employs machine learning and anomaly detection to identify unknown risks and zero-day threats targeting AWS, Azure and GCP environments.
• Provides centralized visibility, pipelines and policies facilitating consistent security control, governance and compliance management at scale.
• Offers to alert for critical issues provide remediation guidance and verifies fixes with continuous analysis and policy enforcement across accounts/regions/workloads.

CloudZero

CloudZero is a resource optimization SaaS tool reducing cloud costs by up to 30% through utilization reporting, budget recommendations and predictive timing for project lifecycles. Visibility and governance prevent overspending on new instances or behind-scheduled projects.

Features

• Offers cloud cost management and optimization with 30% average cost savings.
• Provides real-time visibility into spending, usage metrics, charge details, and alignment with key goals.
• Enables setting budgets, alerts, forecasts and recommendations optimizing costs and resource allocation.
• Supports allocating project/workload-level budgets and reviewing funding status regularly to avoid overspending or budget surprises.
• Monitors for unused resources, leakage and inefficiencies facilitating rightsizing instances or shutting down non-essential workloads.
• Delivers insights into how spending habits influence costs and the impact of changes over time.

CloudHub

Cloudhub is an Integrated workflow/DevOps management platform for building, testing, deploying and managing cloud-native applications. Facilitates continuous integration, delivery and collaboration between teams, increasing speed, quality, consistency and governance.

Features

• Offers administration and access controls ensuring governance.
• Enables monitoring applications, infrastructure and deployments, ensuring quality and managing risk.
• Supports managing releases, rollbacks, versions, testing environments and the overall software development lifecycle.
• Provides repositories for organizing source control, build artifacts, releases and other workflow artifacts.
• Facilitates continuous integration and delivery with development, testing and deployment tools integrated into DevOps lifecycles.
• Provides a workflow/DevOps collaborative environment for developing and managing cloud-native and traditional applications.

Ansible

Ansible is an oOpen-source automation platform with playbooks and roles facilitating configuration management, provisioning, application deployment, post-deployment changes and integration across IT stack components. Supports many cloud platforms, on-premises environments and networking equipment.

Features

• Automates provisioning, configuration, application deployment, integration and maintenance across IT environments.
• Supports major cloud providers, on-premises infrastructure and network devices using a simple, easy-to-read language.
• Enables workflows for continuous integration/delivery, release/rollback management, and managing software configuration updates at scale.
• Facilitates centralized management of infrastructure changes, ensures consistency and reduces errors/downtime.
• Integrates with monitoring, version control, workflow and other tools for visibility and governance. Supports both open-source Ansible Engine and enterprise Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Cloudability

Apptio Cloudability is a Cloud management platform with workload optimization, cost controls, compliance monitoring and governance capabilities across AWS, Azure, GCP and other cloud providers/accounts. Enables aligning spend with strategic objectives while adhering to policies and best practices.

Features

• Delivers cloud cost management and optimization across AWS, Azure, GCP and other cloud providers/accounts.
• Provides visibility into real-time spending, usage metrics, charge details, and alignment with key business goals.
• Enables setting budgets, alerts and recommendations to control costs while maximizing resource utilization.
• Offers workload-level tags, budgets, reservations, backups management, entitlement management and scanning for inefficiencies/waste.
• Integrates time-scheduled, instance resize/termination, and at-scale environment management to reduce spend through rightsizing changes.
• Facilitates allocating funding at a project/account/billing group level, reviewing status regularly against budgets to avoid overspending or surprises.
• Supports automated optimization by applying data-driven recommendations tailored to infrastructure configurations and workload needs.

4 Models Of Cloud Computing Tools

• On-premise: The on-premise cloud computing tools deliver the flexibility and scalability of the cloud within private data centres. It enables organizations to benefit from the efficiencies and innovation of cloud architectures while maintaining full control and governance of infrastructure, data, applications and workloads.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides businesses with the infrastructure they need to build, deploy, and manage their applications. With IaaS, businesses can rent virtual servers, storage, and networking resources from a cloud provider, eliminating the need to invest in costly on-premise hardware.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides businesses with a platform for developing, testing, and deploying their applications. With PaaS, businesses can access pre-built software components, databases, and tools to streamline their development process and reduce time-to-market.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides businesses access to software applications over the Internet. With SaaS, businesses can avoid installing and maintaining software on their own computers, as the software is hosted by the cloud provider and accessed through a web browser.

Importance of cloud tools in today’s business environment

Cloud Tools represent crucial technology enablers for success in today’s fast-paced, data-driven, globally connected business environment. Here is the reason why –

1. Flexibility and Scalability: Cloud Tools provide on-demand access to resources that can be rapidly provisioned and scaled up or down as needed. This enables adapting infrastructure and costs to changing business demands, experimenting with new initiatives and absorbing spikes/seasonal fluctuations in workload volumes. Scaling resources up or down minimizes waste and optimizes spend.
2. Agility: Cloud Tools accelerate development and deployment cycles through integrated tools, automation and continuous integration/delivery practices. New features and updates can be built and released faster while ensuring quality and managing risk. This enables keeping pace with customer expectations, technology changes and competitive threats.
3. Innovation: Cloud Tools facilitate innovation through services, integrations, partnerships, AI/ML and other emerging technologies that improve products, engage customers and optimize operations. They provide an open and integrated ecosystem where new ideas can be built and scaled rapidly. This is crucial for gaining competitive advantage, growth and long-term sustainability.
4. Cost Efficiency: Cloud Tools deliver computing resources on a pay-as-you-go model without upfront costs. Organizations only pay for what they use and can reduce spending by scaling down underutilized resources. This improves affordability while still enabling quick scaling up when needed. Efficient use of resources also lowers expenses from reduced wasted capacity and simplified management/maintenance.
5. Integrated Management: Cloud Tools provide automated, policy-based and programmatic management across complex, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Resources can be provisioned, configured, monitored, optimized and governed at a huge scale through workflows, metadata, security controls, alerts and reporting integrated into the platform. This ensures consistency, compliance, continuous compliance and optimized costs/performance.

In summary, selecting the right mix of Cloud Tools establishes a foundation for realizing future potential through flexibility and scalability while maintaining governance. Cloud Tools establish the foundation through integrated, optimized and adaptable environments that meet the constant evolution of problems, users, systems, data, threats and regulations. The journey to smarter digital organizations built to last depends on seamlessly incorporating Cloud Tools, technologies and partnerships that continuously reshape possibilities and expectations. By using the top 10 cloud tools, businesses can take full advantage of the benefits of cloud computing and achieve their strategic goals.

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