Cloud Management

Continuous Automation for Cloud Services

Cloud Management tools represent a paradigm shift in system and application management addressing common challenges of the cloud. Cloud Computing becomes more valuable and affordable if provisioning and management of infrastructure resources and application layer services is automated and intuitive.

In a world of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), where systems can be provisioned and decommissioned in a matter of seconds, robust automation is essential for service reliability, availability, governance and compliance. Modern, cloud-aware Configuration Management tools can apply human-readable configuration policies to infrastructure resources, runtime environments and cloud applications. Such policies can be reused across cloud environments of varying scale, where deviations from the desired system state are quickly detected and remediated, and all configuration changes provide an audit trail for troubleshooting and compliance purposes.

Cloud Management tools typically provide the following capabilities for the Cloud Computing ecosystems:

• Infrastructure Scaling — provision infrastructure resources on demand and upon host request.
• Configuration Modeling — create and enforce declarative configurations based on the target state.
• Application Deployment — deploy applications on bare-metal, virtual or container infrastructure.
• Workflow Management — configure workflows and execute jobs based on time and frequency.
• Project Control — manage configuration set owners, permissions, tasks and status notifications.
• System Inventory — manage collections of physical or virtual hosts as job execution targets.
• Code Management — version, review, test and promote configurations across environments.

Some examples of Cloud Management tools are Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Rudder, SaltStack and Terraform.