Top 15 Cloud Infrastructure Management Tools

‍In today's digitally-driven world, cloud infrastructure management tools have become crucial for businesses seeking to harness the power of cloud computing effectively. These tools offer a comprehensive suite of functionalities designed to simplify and optimize the management of cloud resources, ranging from provisioning and monitoring to security and governance. 

With the ever-growing complexity of cloud environments and the myriad of services available, selecting the right tools is paramount to ensuring operational efficiency, scalability, and security. In this article, we will explore the top 15 cloud infrastructure management tools streamlining how organizations manage and optimize their cloud-based infrastructure.

What Are Cloud Infrastructure Management Tools?

Cloud infrastructure management tools are a set of software solutions designed to streamline the management of cloud resources and services. These tools enable organizations to deploy, monitor, optimize, and secure their cloud infrastructure efficiently. 

Given the growing complexity of cloud environments and the diverse array of services offered by cloud providers, these tools are essential for businesses to manage their cloud operations effectively.

By employing such tools to manage cloud infrastructure, businesses aim to achieve the following objectives:

1. Automation of workflow without the need for human intervention or monitoring. It also includes achieving flexibility and scalability without involving DevOps teams or Cloud Service Providers (CSP).
2. Cost-efficiency by preventing downtimes and over-provisioning of resources. 
3. Saving time in the process without disruption of duties that require human attention.
4. Cloud analysis to better understand infrastructure usage that can facilitate proper planning, allocation of resources, and budgeting. 

However, it goes without saying that to work with cloud management tools, a competent IT team is required to ensure that the purposes and benefits of those tools are fully realized so that companies can seamlessly maintain their cloud infrastructure and achieve all their desired goals in alignment with their business objectives and budget. 

Benefits of Cloud Infrastructure Management Tools

Cloud infrastructure management tools are indispensable for efficient management of cloud resources. They offer many benefits that have streamlined operational efficiencies for companies that have embraced them. Here are some key advantages provided by these tools:

1. Automation of Complex Processes: Working with large volumes of data is generally a very complex and tedious, which calls for cloud computing solutions. However, even cloud management tools have a certain level of complexity because they handle several different tasks, such as optimizing resources, managing storage, safeguarding data and confidential information, scaling, etc., all of which require human intervention to monitor them and manually perform all necessary actions. 
   With the rise of AI and ML tools integrated with cloud computing and management tools, automation has never been easier. These tools have been revolutionary in streamlining cloud management processes within limited time frames and with little to no errors. This has allowed employees and management teams to focus on high-value tasks that require human attention, which has given a significant boost in productivity.

2. Enhanced Cost Savings: Cloud infrastructure management tools help organizations optimize their cloud spending by providing insights into resource utilization and identifying opportunities for cost savings. By analyzing usage patterns and recommending right-sizing options, these tools enable businesses to eliminate wasteful spending and maximize their return on investment (ROI) in the cloud.

3. Scaling: With cloud infrastructure management tools, organizations can easily scale their resources up or down in response to fluctuating demand. Whether it's provisioning additional virtual machines to handle increased workload or dynamically adjusting resource allocations based on traffic patterns, these tools ensure that businesses can maintain agility and flexibility in their operations.

4. Reporting: Reporting is an additional benefit offered by cloud management tools. These tools can measure cloud usage across teams and even multiple divisions in an organization's structure. From reports generated, operations teams and management can identify areas with the highest and lowest cloud usage and compare that data against their revenue and budget. This gives them a better understanding of how cloud services benefit their business and facilitates better decision-making regarding cost-savings and resource allocation. 

Cloud Infrastructure Management Tools

This section provides an overview of the top 15 cloud infrastructure management tools, each offering unique functionalities to help businesses streamline operations, enhance security, and maximize the value of their cloud investments.

1. Lucidity

Lucidity is a cutting-edge cloud infrastructure management solution designed to optimize block storage utilization. In today's data-driven landscape, many companies rely on cloud computing to handle vast amounts of data, often requiring higher storage levels. However, the common practice of over-provisioning can lead to suboptimal returns on investment. 

Lucidity addresses this challenge by optimizing block storage utilization within a company's cloud infrastructure, ensuring appropriate provisioning without any wastage or retention of underused areas. By leveraging Lucidity, companies can achieve up to 70% cost savings through an automated, 10 times more efficient process than traditional methods, requiring no code changes or human involvement.

The other prevailing issue that this product was built for and aimed to solve is downtime, as it can be detrimental to an organization's operational efficiency and financial resources during the optimization or maintenance of cloud infrastructure. 

A standout feature of Lucidity is its status as the first-ever autonomous storage orchestration tool in the industry. While other cloud service providers like Azure, AWS, and GCP offer features for block storage expansion, they lack capabilities for live shrinkage. Manual processes for storage optimization are time-consuming and prone to downtime due to the complexity involved. Lucidity's block storage auto-scaler alleviates these challenges, providing a seamless solution for efficient storage management.

Lucidity's effectiveness is underscored by its adoption by several Fortune 500 companies, including American Airlines, SpartanNash, and other large-scale firms worldwide. Its innovative approach to cloud infrastructure management makes it a trusted solution for optimizing storage utilization and minimizing downtime in mission-critical environments. 

By focusing heavily on optimizing block storage, Lucidity offers two innovative solutions:

• Block Storage Auto-scaler: Lucidity's Block Storage Auto-scaler streamlines storage management by automating the expansion or shrinkage of storage capacities in real-time. This innovative solution eliminates the common problem of overprovisioning by dynamically adjusting storage resources according to the server's requirements. By swiftly responding to fluctuating demands, it ensures optimal resource utilization while streamlining the provisioning process. The Block Storage Auto-scaler effectively addresses the challenge of balancing storage capacity with workload requirements, leading to enhanced efficiency and cost savings. 
• Storage Audit: Lucidity's Storage Audit solution provides invaluable insights into storage usage patterns, enabling organizations to identify inefficiencies and underused areas within their cloud infrastructure. By conducting a comprehensive analysis of storage utilization, it helps mitigate concerns related to escalating storage costs and their impact on cloud bills. Moreover, the Storage Audit solution alleviates the burden on DevOps teams by eliminating the need for manual analysis, which consumes significant time and resources. With its automated approach to storage optimization, Lucidity empowers organizations to make informed decisions and maximize the value of their cloud investments.

How Does Lucidity Work?

Lucidity acts as an additional layer to the cloud's block storage, be it AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. Taking the example of the EC2 Instance, optimizing disk utilization begins with the management of EBS volumes, which can either be expanded or shrunk. 

An agent is hosted first, which can be done in three different ways:

1. Lucidity-hosted: The agent alone is installed within the cloud infrastructure, while the auto-scaler remains within Lucidity’s servers. It will read and analyze a few storage metrics, such as Disk utilization, Throughput, Volume, Burst, Queue, Latency, and IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). From there, the auto-scaler engine will issue commands on whether to expand or shrink the storage volume, after which the agent takes that action without causing any downtime. 

2. Self-hosted: The entire auto-scaler, including the agent, are seamlessly integrated into the client's server.
3. Private Link: Lucidity offers a private link feature that provides high-end data protection services where resource allocation data seamlessly travels to the servers. AWS and Azure also provide this feature solely dedicated to the user with maximum data security.

Before the agent is hosted, Lucidity will perform a comprehensive storage audit, which is offered as a free service. The audit will generate a detailed report within a week on current storage inefficiencies, underused and risk areas, and areas where money can be saved. A few examples of such information provided in the audit report include:

• Present disk spend, areas where costs can be optimized, and how to reduce overall cloud costs incurred by 70%
• Disk downtime risks that are identified to prevent them early on to save the financial resources and reputation of the company
• Idle resources and over-provisioned areas that can be eliminated 

Besides being highly secure and trustworthy, Lucidity is very easy to set up and onboard into cloud servers. It only takes a three-click process, after which block storage management will be done automatically. 

Benefits of Lucidity

Some of the major benefits of Lucidity include the following:

• Zero Downtime: Lucidity ensures uninterrupted operation during maintenance or optimization of storage resources, even during sudden spikes or reductions in activity. Unlike manual configurations that may cause temporary shutdowns, Lucidity's Auto-scaler minimizes downtime and latency, ensuring continuous availability of services. 

• Automated Resource Management: By automating the expansion or shrinking of disk utilization without human intervention, Lucidity empowers DevOps teams to focus on high-value tasks, optimizing their productivity and resource allocation. This automation streamlines operations and eliminates the need for manual interventions, saving time and resources. 
• Cost Savings: Lucidity enables significant cost savings, with potential reductions of up to 70% in storage costs. By eliminating the need for over-provisioning and providing the optimal amount of storage, the Auto-scaler minimizes unnecessary expenses. Additionally, Lucidity improves disk utilization, increasing from 35% to 80%, further maximizing cost efficiency. 
• Customized Policy Management: The Auto-scaler offers a "Customized Policy" option, allowing users to create and configure their own protocols tailored to their specific requirements. Users can define parameters such as policy name, desired utilization, maximum disk size, and buffer size. Lucidity adheres to these policies, ensuring precise instance management that aligns with user preferences. 

• Intuitive Interface: Lucidity boasts a simple and intuitive interface, designed to be user-friendly and accessible. The all-access dashboard provides comprehensive insights into various metrics, including cost savings, average disk utilization before and after Lucidity implementation, disk coverage, return on investment (ROI), and the number of Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) calls avoided. This visibility enables users to monitor performance and make informed decisions effectively.

2. CloudBolt

CloudBolt stands out as a hybrid cloud management solution, offering a unified interface for seamlessly integrating and efficiently managing both on-premises resources and public clouds. Its robust suite of tools empowers users to streamline workflows and optimize resources across various technologies and cloud service providers. CloudBolt facilitates easy importation, synchronization, and management of both legacy and modern cloud environments, enhancing flexibility and agility in cloud management operations.

3. Terraform

Developed by HashiCorp, Terraform is a popular open-source Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platform that over 32,000 companies worldwide use as of 2024. Users can build and change their cloud infrastructure efficiently through automated infrastructure provisioning and resource management while simplifying governance and collaboration measures between teams. 

4. Flexera

Flexera was built to optimize cloud spending through automatic resource optimization, budget control, cost policies, aggregation of bills, and identifying savings opportunities wherever possible. What sets this platform apart from its competitors is that it acts on recommendation, which enhances efficiency and scalability in cost controls.

5. AppDynamics

Developed by Cisco, AppDynamics provides users with full-stack management tools for cloud infrastructure, applications, and security. This solution can optimize applications and resources by managing key business metrics, code-level issues, and APIs. It also provides users with insights into customer experiences so they can be improved further.

6. Datadog

Datadog is a popular SaaS-based cloud monitoring and analytics solution that companies with large-scale applications and Cloud infrastructure primarily use. With over 200 vendor-supported integrations, the platform provides full-stack observability by combining real-time metrics from servers, applications, and databases with end-to-end tracing. Datadog provides insights on cloud expenditure and recommendations on rightsizing to optimize cloud spend. 

7. TotalCloud

Developed by Qualys, TotalCloud is an all-in-one cloud infrastructure security solution that gives users deep visibility into their cloud environment after activation. One of the salient features of this platform that sets it apart from others is that it offers maximum customizability in automating cloud management, regardless of its complexity. Users can build automation bots and manage workflows efficiently without having to code.

8. IBM Cloud Orchestrator

IBM Cloud Orchestrator was built to provide an automated and flexible way for users to integrate the cloud with various IT infrastructures and customer data center policies. From the administration of cloud services to providing an intuitive and easy-to-access dashboard for quick monitoring and revealing of executive costs, this platform offers a plethora of features for effective and consistent management of resources within the cloud infrastructure.

9. Apache CloudStack

Apache CloudStack is predominantly an open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. As the name suggests, it has been built to provide a full "stack" of features needed for IaaS management, starting with a simple and easy-to-use interface, user and account management, automated cloud configuration, etc.

Despite CloudStack's numerous features, its steep learning curve and complex configurations will require teams to undergo some training to fully realize the platform's benefits.

10. Apptio Cloudability

Apptio Cloudability is a financial management platform that analyzes technological spending and operational data to produce insights on optimizingcloud resources to improve speed and performance and reduce costs. What sets this tool apart is that its primary focus is FinOps. This means that it looks into the financial aspects of the cloud environment and provides budgeting, forecasting, and right-sizing features to support the finance teams and executives in understanding cloud spend and driving business decisions accordingly.

11. Morpheus Data

Morpheus Data is a self-service cloud management tool with infrastructure provisioning and orchestration capabilities that allow DevOps teams to automate cloud management workflows and optimize cloud costs. This tool enables users to build and manage a public cloud and govern hybrid clouds. What sets it apart is its simple interface and integration capabilities with other cloud tools such as Terraform, Jenkins, Chef, etc.

12. Cloudhealth by VMware

Developed under VMware, Cloudhealth provides its services through a single interface where users can manage cloud costs, enhance cloud performance, and access robust security features to safeguard important and confidential data. The platform's comprehensive set of tools allows users to efficiently manage and optimize cloud resources to derive higher business value, and it also has multi-cloud support with environment monitoring for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

13. OpenStack

OpenStack is a free, open-source cloud computing solution deployed as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service in public and private clouds. The tool helps users manage computing tasks and optimize storage and networking resources through APIs. Additionally, its functionality extends to fault, identity, and service management, all managed by three interfaces: web-based dashboard, command-line tools, and RESTful web services.

14. CloudCheckr by NetApp

CloudCheckr, a part of Spot by NetApp, is an end-to-end cloud management platform mostly used by large enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs). It enables companies to seamlessly manage and reduce cloud costs, optimize resources, improve governance, and scale multi-cloud environments within a single platform. Additionally, it offers more visibility and analytic tools for cloud spend as well as automation capabilities. 

15. Rubrik

Rubrik is a popular multi-cloud data management and protection tool that technically isn’t a dedicated cloud management platform, but it can still perform cloud data management and protection activities. Azure, AWS, and GCP application data will be cyber-proofed through secure and access-controlled backups, ensuring higher data security under all cloud platforms.

‍