Cloud Operations Made Easier with These Stellar Tools
Cloud operations in 2021 are more complex than ever, with a plethora of cloud service providers available. In turn, managing costs associated with cloud solutions has never been more challenging. That’s why we’re here to compare three well-known cloud operations tools: AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, and Terraform. We will provide an unbiased comparison and look for which features are most beneficial to simplify and streamline your cloud infrastructure even further.
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation is a tool designed to remotely manage multi-server environments. It offers infrastructure as code, which means you can create templates that define the necessary resources every time you need to make improvements in your infrastructure. This helps to simplify and standardize scaling, recreating and updating your architecture. With AWS CloudFormation, you can build and deploy your applications, minimizing the number of mistakes that can occur during the process.
AWS CloudFormation features:
- AWS CloudFormation updates resources in a stack safely and efficiently, addressing any critical dependencies between different resources.
- The tool sends notifications on stack complete failures and has integration with SNS.
When calculating the costs, AWS CloudFormation pricing varies depending on your specific requirements, including the number of stacks and the size of the stacks launched. Therefore, cost optimization takes a more prominent role in managing your cloud infrastructure.
Azure Resource Manager
Azure Resource Manager is Microsoft's approach to managing and delivering resources on their cloud platform. Similar to AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager defines the infrastructure by using code, enabling you to repeat deployment and update sets of resources over time. A substantial feature of Azure Resource Manager is the ability to manage resources across multiple regions and subscriptions.
Azure Resource Manager features:
- The tool has a built-in templates library to set up common applications such as Jenkins or Kubernetes.
- Allows for the automation of infrastructure deployment and configuration.
Azure Resource Manager pricing starts with a free account, but like AWS CloudFormation, the cost structure can become complex as features are added. Cost savings can be achieved by finding a balance between cost and service optimization in Azure.
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source cloud operations tool that enables you to use infrastructure as code to build, change, and version your infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform supports multi-cloud services, meaning that it is compatible with different providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It is an excellent choice when dealing with complex multiple cloud solutions.
Terraform features:
- Has complete and detailed documentation.
- Supports version control
Terraform's pricing structure is straightforward, since it is a free and open-source tool that does not require purchasing licenses. However, it has fewer pre-built templates, so there may be more resource-intensive work when deploying your infrastructure.
Our Conclusion
In summary, each cloud operations tool has its own advantages depending on the specifics of the user's infrastructure. AWS CloudFormation provides greater flexibility with stack updates, Azure Resource Manager provides a template library and multi-region management, and Terraform supports multi-cloud services, which is great for users with complex infrastructures.
It is also important to note that managing cloud billing and cost optimization is crucial when using these tools, thus finding the right balance between uptime and cost is vital.
So which one should you choose? While we can't deliver a definitive answer to that question, it is important to note that by spending some time getting familiar with each cloud operations tool and its various features you can ensure that the infrastructure you deploy is reliable, repeatable, and supportable.
Have you used any of these cloud operations tools? Let us know which tool worked best for your cloud infrastructure in the comment section below!