Key cloud infrastructure management offerings provide similar core features

Cloud Management is a hot topic, and it is popular that every start-up and established vendors provide some tools to manage the cloud environment. There are monitoring tools, configuration tools, and tools in between. There are naturally foggy pieces on the market (vaporware), and it is not easy to get a clear idea.

If you deploy a cloud that is fairly static or not a mission-critical environment, you may not need to configure the system dynamically. In this case, the product's built-in standard tools for adding/changing/removing resources may be more than sufficient.

Several vendors have products designed specifically for cloud computing management (VMware, OPENQRM, Cloudkick, and Consolidator Methods), as well as large vendors like BMC, HP, IBM Tivoli and the crown. Each vendor uses a number of methods to alert for impending problems, or to send a warning signal when a problem arises. They can also track trends in performance analysis.

Although they all have distinctive features, they all focus on a key concept: providing information about cloud computing systems. If you encounter the need to configure resources, there is no better than choosing "agent or agentless" or "SNMP or WBEM."

The main cloud infrastructure management offerings offer similar core features:

• Most support different types of clouds (often referred to as hybrid clouds).

• Most support dynamic creation and configuration of new objects, enabling the dynamic destruction of unnecessary objects, such as servers, storage systems, and/or applications.

• Most typically provide a set of status reports (uptime, response time, quota usage, and so on), as well as dashboards for in-depth analysis.

When it comes to meeting these three standards, few vendors provide a common approach to configuring and managing metrics in a mixed environment: only Rightscale, Kaavo, Zeus, SCALR and morph. There are also solutions offered by cloud service providers that meet the second and third criteria, such as the Cloudwatch of Amazon's Web services company.

The big companies, known for their traditional data center monitoring applications, have been slow to enter the cloud-management tools market, and their offerings are simply a makeover of existing applications and provide nothing more than reporting and alerting tools. The Crown group is aggressively acquiring companies to solve this problem and has acquired 3Tera of this cloud configuration maker.

In the early years, the industry was in disarray, with an example of IBM's Tivoli Cloud Computing Product Web page (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/cloudcomputing/solutions.html). You will find that by clicking on the Getting Started tab, the results show 404 page Access Errors (Note: The latest version has resolved this error). That's good, IBM.

At the same time, HP's OpenView (now called the Operations Manager) can manage cloud-based servers, but identical the ability to manage any other server. The BMC is committed to developing a cloud management tool, but so far nothing is more powerful than its usual product.

The second-tier firms that shine on the market are designed to replace the Giants ' products by providing applications that focus on monitoring capabilities, including scout, UpTime Bae, Cloudkick, NetIQ and ScienceLogic. And the "previously named Hyperic Application", which was VMware after VMware acquired SpringSource.

In fact, when it comes to writing about all the products in this field, it can be said to be numerous; but one or two years later, the number of firms in this area will be much smaller, thanks to mergers and acquisitions, corporate closures and market consolidation. Cloud computing has grown rapidly and is not limited to the normative side. For now, the cloud computing market is like the Western wilderness of the United States: the vast, sparsely populated, lack of order, except for a few bright spots.

The following are the best infrastructure management and configuration solutions available today:

Rightscale

Rightscale is currently the leader in this industry. Like many manufacturers in emerging markets, it also offers a free version with limited functionality and capacity, designed to introduce you to its products (and possibly addictive, just like the famous business model of Geely in early 20th century, http://itotd.com/articles/295/ giving-away-the-razor-selling-the-blades/). Rightscale products are divided into four components:

• Cloud Management environment

• Cloud-Ready server templates and best Practices deployment libraries

• Adaptive Automation engine

• Cloudy engine

The fifth feature claims that "easily scalable platforms (readily extensible Platform) support the ability of users to programmatically access the Rightscale platform." A careful look at this product will reveal that these features are not independent of each other, but rather an excellent, integrated solution.

The Rightscale management environment is the main interface for users to interact with the software. It is designed to help users complete the initial process of migrating to a cloud environment using templates and libraries. The management environment can then be used to manage the environment, which is to continue building and ensuring the availability of resources. At this point, the automation engine comes in handy: the ability to quickly configure resources, open additional capacity, or remove excess capacity, as needed. Finally, there are cloudy engines that can support Amazon, Gogrid, Eucalyptus and Rackspace.

Rightscale is also committed to supporting chef open source system integration specifications. Chef is entirely designed for cloud computing.

Kaavo

Kaavo's main area is very similar to Rightscale. This product is typically used to:

• With a click, you can deploy complex multi-tier applications (development, quality assurance, and production applications) on the cloud.

• Automatically add/Remove resources to respond to demand surges/changes

• Runtime management of the application infrastructure in the cloud

• Encrypt persistent data in the cloud

• Automate workflow to handle abnormal conditions in the RUN-TIME production environment without human intervention

The core name of the Kaavo product is imod. Imod can handle tasks such as setting up, configuring, and adapting to cloud environments, and in a mixed mode across multiple vendors ' products. Like all major common Information model (CIM) vendors, Kaavo's imod is on the "top" of the stack, managing the infrastructure layer and the application layer.

One of the outstanding features of Imod is its cloudy single system tool. For example, you can create a database back-end system in Rackspace and build the presentation server on the Amazon cloud. The eucalyptus of Amazon and Rackspace and private cloud areas supporting the public cloud is an attractive selling point; but it should be worth mentioning that if most cloud management products support Amazon, it should also support eucalyptus, Because eucalyptus very much resembles the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

Both Kaavo and Rightscale provide the planned "add" or "reduce" (dynamically allocated resources on demand) tools and monitoring tools to ensure that information and internal metrics, such as service level agreements, are transparent and available. Dynamic allocation can even help meet the requirements of those service-level agreements. Kaavo and Rightscale also provide the ability to retain templates to simplify the effort to deploy multi-tier systems.

Zeus

Zeus is known for its rock-solid Web server, and although its Web server has a small market share, it does have a large number of enthusiasts and top-notch customers. Because Apache and IIS dominate the market, not to mention the large number of load-balancing systems available, Zeus, with its expertise in the field of application servers, has launched the application delivery controller for Zeus traffic controllers (creator IBuySpy Controller) This component. It uses traditional load-balancing tools to test availability and then spontaneously generates or destroys additional instances of the cloud, providing dynamic configuration capabilities. Zeus currently supports this feature on the Rackspace platform and Amazon platform, with little support on the latter platform.

Scalr

SCALR is a new project hosted on Google Code and scalr.net, similar to Kaavo and Rightscale, where it creates dynamic clusters on the Amazon platform. It supports the ability to increase or decrease capacity based on traffic requirements, support snapshots (by the way, snapshots can be shared, this is cool), and it is similar to Rightscale for each server or class of servers to customize the mirroring system. Because of the new version, SCALR does not support a large number of platforms, operating systems, applications, and databases like the most powerful rivals, insisting on the traditional extended lamp architecture (lamp plus ruby and Tomcat), which contains many content systems.

Morph

Although not a true management platform, the Morph product of a managed service provider (MSP) provides similar functionality in its own private cloud domain. Morph Cloudserver is a relatively new product in the market, which breaks into the management and configuration domain in the form of hardware devices. It is intended for businesses that seek to deploy private clouds. Its first-class product Morph Cloudserver is based on IBM BladeCenter and can support hundreds of virtual machines.

Below the product core is the Ubuntu Linux operating system and the Eucalyptus Cloud computing platform. Morph is geared toward the hosting provider market, creating private clouds and dynamically configuring resources within those closed cloud environments. Although Morph is still an up-and-comer, it has attracted much attention, especially because it is rooted in open source and actively participates in the opening cloud organization.

Cloudwatch

Amazon's cloudwatch only runs on Amazon's platform, which limits its overall use because it cannot be a hybrid cloud management tool. Because Amazon's flexible Computing Cloud (EC2) is the largest cloud platform on the market (though Rackspace claims to be rapidly narrowing its gap with Amazon), it is worth mentioning.

EC2-oriented Cloudwatch supports dynamic configuration (called automatic scaling), monitoring, and load balancing, which is managed through the central management console-Amazon network Services uses the same central management console. Its greatest advantage is that it does not need to install any additional software, nor does it require access to any other Web site to obtain the application. While this product is clearly not geared toward companies that need to support mixed clouds, the companies that use Amazon entirely should know that it is as mature and practical as the tools of other vendors on the market.

Concluding

As there are so many tools on the market, it is important that data centre managers start their assessments early and focus on the development of the market. This change in the nature of the IT infrastructure is both broad and rapid, and it is inevitable that you will need to constantly revise your plans, evaluate your products continuously, and observe what happens to each company behind those products. Obviously, Rightscale a leading advantage early, but other manufacturers are struggling to catch up, it is worth paying close attention to.

Original link: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/report/Cloud-management-tools-guide-for-beginners

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)