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Table of Contents
Introduction
The most awaited second part of the exciting series has come. In the first part of this series, we saw the factors assessed before choosing the suitable cloud service model for your organization.
We saw in detail the three cloud service models IAAS, PAAS, SAAS in detail. Also, we saw factors that decide the selection of these services and under what conditions we choose one or multiple cloud models.
We also saw some real-time examples of when these models are selected, and which types of organizations use them. Therefore, this first blog would have helped you choose the suitable service model for your organization after considering valid factors.
We got many questions from you regarding the cloud service models and our services concerning the cloud. We will be more than happy to assist you with all your queries, and as a step towards that, we will be writing this second blog to help you take another step towards your cloud journey.
We will be talking about various cloud management tools required for a company to make their cloud transition. We will analyze the different products offered by major cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google.
These management tools provided by the major service providers will be categorized under four crucial categories, which will help your organisation’s cloud management.
You will get to know about the most widely talked about tool in the technical ethos and can make use of it to improvise your cloud services. So let us get into the topic without further ado!
Different Categories For Grouping The Tools
We will see four broad categories under which the tools will be classified. Configuration Management and Administration, Monitoring, Security, Cost Optimization. With much effort, we have grouped them under these four categories to be beneficial for you to process the information.
Microsoft Azure
Popularly known as azure from Microsoft is famous for its cloud services all around the world. Starting its journey in 2008, it has spread its arms wide across the globe in 55 regions spread across 140 countries. But, first, let us take a look at the tools or products azure offers in the four main categories:
Configuration Management and Administration
- Cloud Shell & Automation– Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work, either Bash or PowerShell.
- Microsoft Azure Portal– A single, easy-to-use console to manage your team and your projects. This unified hub simplifies building, deploying, and managing your cloud resources. In addition, it is used for organizing your portal and dashboard.
- Azure Purview– Azure Purview is a unified data governance service that helps you manage and govern your on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data. It is used for automated data discovery, sensitive data classification.
Monitoring
- Network Watcher– You can monitor your virtual machine network using its feature of security group view. You can diagnose your VPN connectivity issues using a network watcher. Using the logs, you can derive your usage, understand your network usage a lot, and customize your plans and investment accordingly.
- Azure Monitor– Monitor your network, applications, infrastructure and everything using this monitor. Azure Monitor collects monitoring telemetry from a variety of on-premises and Azure sources. In addition, management tools, such as those in Azure Security Center and Azure Automation, also push log data to Azure Monitor.
- Application Insights– It is a feature of Azure Monitor. It is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals. It is used to monitor your live applications. In addition, it is used to detect performance issues automatically. It works for apps on various platforms, including .NET, Node.js, Java, and Python hosted on-premises, hybrid, or any public cloud.
Security
- Azure Policy– It helps to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance at scale. Its compliance dashboard provides an aggregated view to evaluate the overall state of the environment, with the ability to drill down to the per-resource, per-policy granularity.
- Azure Backup– This Microsoft Azure product provides simple, secure, and cost-effective solutions to back up your data and recover it from the Microsoft Azure cloud. You can get short term and long term backup without the need to deploy on-prem solutions.
- Log Analytics– It is a service in Operations Management Suite that helps you collect and analyze data generated by resources in your cloud and on-premises environments. It gives you real-time insights using integrated search and custom dashboards to readily analyze millions of records across all of your workloads and servers regardless of their physical location.
Cost Optimization
- Azure Advisor– This product of Microsoft Azure analyzes your configurations and offers personalized, actionable recommendations to help you optimize your resources for reliability, security, operational excellence, performance and cost.
- Azure Cost Management and Billing– Monitor your spending on cloud and manage your spending with this intelligent tool. It integrates with the azure advisor and removes idle resources by itself in regular cycles.
- Azure Resource Mover– Features of azure resources mover, which lets you move your resources to regions that best suits your needs. You can effectively plan using this tool and save much cost that goes into moving resources; otherwise, without an idea. Find out the region that best meets your compliance, performance and needs using this tool.
Amazon Web Services(AWS)
Amazon Web Services platform offers us a wide range of reliable, scalable and most innovative cloud solutions. It is easy to use the platform provided by Amazon to us. It offers nearly 100 cloud services across various verticals spread across 25 geographical locations. It has 80 availability zones and plans for 15 more zones and five more AWS regions in India, Australia, Indonesia, Spain and Switzerland.
Configuration Management and Administration
- AWSOpsWorks – AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet. Chef and Puppet are automation platforms that allow you to use code to automate the configurations of your servers. OpsWorks lets you use Chef and Puppet to automate how servers are configured, deployed and managed across your Amazon EC2 instances or on-premises compute environments. OpsWorks has three offerings, AWS Opsworks for Chef Automate, AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise, and AWS OpsWorks Stacks.
- AWS Cloud Formation – AWS CloudFormation gives you an easy way to model a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, provision them quickly and consistently, and manage them throughout their lifecycles by treating infrastructure as code. The benefits of using this tool are you can scale your infrastructure worldwide, seamless integration with other AWS services and many more.
- AWS service catalog – AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services approved for use on AWS. These IT services can include virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. AWS Service Catalog allows you to centrally manage deployed IT services and your applications, resources, and metadata. As a result, you can manage your applications and keep track of cost, performance, security, compliance and operational status at the application level.
Monitoring
- Amazon CloudWatch – It is a monitoring service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.
- AWS CloudTrail – It is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. In addition, CloudTrail provides the event history of your AWS account activity. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. In addition, you can use CloudTrail to detect unusual activity in your AWS accounts.
- AWS Certificate Manager – AWS Certificate Manager is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services and your internal connected resources. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet and resources on private networks.
Security
- AWS Identity and Access Management – AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enable you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.
- AWS Firewall Manager – It is a security management service that allows you to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and applications in AWS Organizations. As new applications are created, Firewall Manager makes it easy to bring new applications and resources into compliance by enforcing a common set of security rules.
- Amazon Cloud Directory – This product enables you to build flexible cloud-native directories for organizing hierarchies of data along multiple dimensions. While traditional directory solutions, such as Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) and other LDAP-based directories, limit you to a single hierarchy, Cloud Directory offers you the flexibility to create directories with hierarchies that span multiple dimensions. In addition, Amazon Cloud Directory automatically scales to hundreds of millions of objects and provides an extensible schema that can be shared with multiple applications.
Cost Optimization
- AWS Cost Explorer – Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to view and analyze your costs and usage. You can explore your usage and costs using the main graph, the Cost Explorer cost and usage reports, or the Cost Explorer RI report. In addition, you can view data for up to the last 12 months, forecast how much you’re likely to spend for the next 12 months, and get recommendations for what Reserved Instances to purchase.
- AWS Trusted Advisor – AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides you with real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. Trusted Advisor checks help optimize your AWS infrastructure, improve security and performance, reduce your overall costs, and monitor service limits.
- AWS Budgets – Businesses and organizations need to plan and set expectations around cloud costs. However, cloud agility requires you to adapt your forecasting processes and tools to match the dynamic nature of your usage. AWS budgets help you customize a plan and helps you stay informed on how the cost usage is, and respond quickly when usage exceeds a threshold.
Google Cloud Platform(GCP)
Google Cloud Platform, offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that can boost your digital transformation journey. GCP provides various cloud offering to help you in cloud services.
Configuration Management and Administration
- Anthos Config Management – This tool comes as a boon to organizations working in a hybrid and multi-cloud container environment. It evaluates changes and rolls them out to all Kubernetes clusters. In addition, it defines and enforces policies across all deployments and maintains control over them.
- Cloud Deployment Manager – It allows you to specify all the resources needed in YAML format beforehand. One can parameterize the configuration using Python or Jinja2 templates.
- Cloud EndPoints – This product provides tools for every phase of API deployment with cloud monitoring. In addition, it manages and protects your API’s.
Monitoring
- Cloud Shell – You can manage and monitor your google cloud resources using cloud shell. You can control your source code, migrate your project when the need arises.
- Cloud Console – Get insights about anything and everything that manages your cloud service using cloud console. It is a simple web-based interface that can handle DevOps workflows on the go with powerful iOS and Android applications.
Security
- Cloud IAM – Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets administrators authorize who can take action on specific resources, giving you full control and visibility to manage Google Cloud resources centrally.
- Cloud Data Loss Prevention – Cloud DLP gives you the power to scan, discover, classify, and report on data from virtually anywhere. Cloud DLP has native support for scanning and classifying sensitive data in Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Datastore and a streaming content API to support additional data sources, custom workloads, and applications.
- Secret Manager – Secret Manager is a secure and convenient storage system for API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data. Secret Manager provides a central place and single source of truth to manage access and audit secrets across Google Cloud.
Cost Optimization
- Cost Management – It is a tool that can showcase your current cost trends and forecasts. It upholds accountability of costs across the organization. It controls the spending using strong financial governance policies. It has intelligent recommendations and dashboards.
- Active Assist – Active Assist is a portfolio of tools that use data, intelligence, and machine learning to reduce cloud complexity and administrative toil, making it easy to optimize your cloud’s security, performance, and cost.
We saw how different cloud service providers create additional tools for various purposes. There are multiple dimensions to the tools listed here, and these top 3 providers provide many more tools. We wanted to categorize and give you the main tools under these four categories.
We have tried our level best to list the top tools in the most important categories. As I have already mentioned, this bunch of tools are from only three providers, and there are several cloud management tool providers worldwide. We can customize and get the best tool for your service based on what is required for every organization.
A piece of information for you– An organization using or planning to use in a future hybrid cloud or multi-cloud services has extra cloud management tools available for use based on the requirement. We can help you narrow down to the best choice of cloud management tool based on our analysis.
Also, Eleviant is a proud working partner with the number one cloud service provider listed here. We can further help you in your cloud transformation journey by providing various other services.
Our experts can talk to you in detail about your plan and how to go about your cloud journey. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries.
We will be more than delighted to help you with your cloud journey!
Prologue for the next part in this blog series
We have looked in detail at the various management tools provided by prestigious cloud providers across the world. We are now coming to the exciting part!
What will be the next part about? It is going to be the final blog of this informative cloud blog series.
What can you expect from it?
It is going to be the most talked-about topic in the cloud arena. It has raised lots of questions among cloud users, but there is no clear and unique answer.
We are going to discuss it in detail. The topic is visible and invisible costs involved in an organization’s cloud journey. It may differ according to the size of an organization or based on needs. This blog can be a deal-breaker and help you plan upfront before you start your cloud journey.
