Cloud computing has changed how companies store, process, and access data. Cloud computing tools help firms scale their operations without significant upfront investments in infrastructure.
What is a Cloud Computing Tool?
A cloud computing tool provides infrastructure, resources, and tools to create and run cloud applications. These tools boost efficiency and productivity and offer solid security features, ensuring compliance with industry regulations.
Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, depending on your project’s type, size, and complexity.
Here are the top 10 cloud computing tools.
1. CloudZero
CloudZero lets SaaS companies gain better visibility into their cloud usage and costs. It helps them minimize costs across their AWS accounts, enabling them to easily determine the ROI of specific projects.
The tagging support feature helps users view immediate insights. Moreover, CloudZero offers a migration acceleration program dashboard called “Budgets” for AWS MAP customers. This makes the tool an ideal cloud cost intelligence platform.
Pros
- The tool provides hourly insights on cloud spending, allowing companies to track costs per product area.
- Developers can model and track their Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), which helps them prioritize infrastructure for maximum savings potential.
Cons
- Unintuitive UI
- Limited Alert Configuring
- Unclear pricing options
2. Cloudsfer
Cloudsfer provides on-premises and cloud-to-cloud migration services that support over 20 cloud storage providers like Google, SharePoint, Office 365, Azure, and Amazon.
While the archiving tool copies and replicates the data from cloud storage, the backup tool enables firms to sync cloud services. Moreover, Cloudsfer can migrate multiple users while maintaining file permissions and metadata
Pros
- Requires no installation, bandwidth, or hardware during the migration
- Filters files by date, size, and file type
- Uses automation to schedule migrations
Cons
- Costly
- Only 250 MB of storage space is available on the free trial
- No mobile or desktop apps
3. Cloudability
Cloudability combines expenditures into accessible and comprehensive reports. This helps companies identify new opportunities for cutting down expenses and increasing cloud efficiency.
Moreover, it offers budget alerts and recommendations via SMS, email, and APIs for connecting cloud billing and usage data to any business or financial system.
The tool seamlessly integrates with common tools like GitHub, Amazon EC2, Heroku, Mailchimp, and New Relic.
Pros
- Assesses the cost involved and keeps track of the budget
- Manages multiple clients on the same platform via a single account simultaneously
- Offers insights into various reports on a single screen, making the analysis more straightforward
- Help assess risks and ensure policy comprehension
Cons
- Combines container usage information with costs in the same dashboard
- Limited ability to track custom savings opportunities
4. RightScale
RightScale is the mediator between an application and the cloud infrastructure. The multi-cloud platform allows companies to deploy and manage apps across public, private, and hybrid clouds. It facilitates automation, configuration, and monitoring of cloud computing infrastructure and apps.
Pros
- RighScale’s governance controls let companies manage reporting, budgeting, and auditing through a “single pane of glass” view.
Cons
- Deployment is complex
- Lacks technical support
- Integration issues due to invalid private node security certificates
5. Lacework
Lacework offers a data-driven Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) and helps manage cloud security and compliance continuously at scale. Firms can gather and analyze security threats across various cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure to prioritize and address them.
The Infrastructure-as-a-Code security solution offers vulnerability, security posture, and compliance management for all the environment’s apps, workloads, containers, machines, and users.
Pros
- Easy to implement
- Assured protection against the latest vulnerabilities and threats
Cons
- The web GUI is less user-friendly
- The fetched data from AWS services is less verbose
- Lack of product support
6. Notion
Notion offers a collaboration tool, knowledge base, workspace, and file-sharing platform in one. It allows developers to share knowledge, workflows, and schedules without using multiple tools.
The tool allows developers to choose a template and modify it and record ideas and progress statuses from meetings and share them.
Pros
- Inexpensive
- User-friendly
- Offers portable multi-platform support
- Offers tutorials and documentation for beginners
- Offers free templates for multiple use cases
Cons
- The availability of many blocks and templates makes the tool overwhelming to use
- Steep learning curve
- Lacks built-in reporting tool
- Lack of communication features
- Restricted mobile app and integrations
7. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS offers on-demand cloud computing tools and APIs to firms seeking distributed computing capabilities. It provides virtual environments that allow users to load and deploy multiple apps and services. The platform facilitates networking and content delivery and offers integrated AWS services like Amazon AppFlow, Augmented AI, and AppStream 2.0.
Pros
- User-friendly
- Flexible
- Secure
- Cost-effective
- Highly scalable
- No capacity limits
Cons
- Limitations regarding EC2 and security
- It has a complex infrastructure; hence, companies need to hire professionals
- The price of AWS services is based on the cost of fiber, electricity, and taxes from region to region
8. Chef
It is an open-source Ruby-based configuration management tool. Admins can programmatically configure virtual systems and eliminate repetitive manual operations using the Chef cloud system.
It helps deliver the most recent/approved policies to infrastructure. It provides reports on compliance issues and security risks and lets users query, visualize, and report on operational events.
Pros
- Offers greater flexibility and control of configurations
- The “Knife” tool eases installations
- The platform has pre-built profiles for Windows, CIS, and Linux
Cons
- Complex tool
- High learning curve
- Does not support push functionality
9. Puppet
Puppet is a software configuration management tool used by system and cloud administrators. It allows firms to automate repetitive tasks, deploy critical apps, and manage on-premise or cloud infrastructure changes.
The tool automates application configuration, patch management, provisioning, discovery, operating system, and infrastructure audit and compliance.
Pros
- The tool is open-source and extendable.
- It derives the system specific data using a feature called “Factor”. Factor helps the tool understand the specifics of OS and IP addresses.
- It works on Fedora, RHEL, Debian, Gentoo, Solaris, OS X, and Windows.
Cons
- Puppy extension requires expertise in Ruby, which can be challenging for beginners
- Lacks comprehensive reporting features
10. Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a scalable virtual environment that powers web programming and mobile apps. It is a fully managed PaaS cloud computing platform that uses built-in services to run the apps.
It offers pay-as-you-go subscriptions and supports Python, PHP, .NET, JAVA, and C#. It is ideal for infrastructure maintenance, testing, and high-performance web development.
Pros
- Offers flexibility to import libraries and frameworks via Docker containers
- Developers can access rules in the Engine’s firewall and use SSL/TLS certificates on custom domains for free.
- Offers Java Run Time Environment version 7, Python Run Time environment version 2.7, PHP runtime’s PHP 5.4 environment, and Go runtime 1.2 environment
Cons
- Lacks documentation and tutorials
- Limited integration options with open-source applications
- Limited UI themes
Also Read: Developing Cohesive DevOps and Cloud Computing Strategies to Bolster Digital Transformation
Conclusion
Companies must use the power of cloud computing tools to remain agile and competitive. These tools help manage, store, and process data efficiently and cost-effectively. Firms can deploy their apps and automate business operations with a robust cloud computing tool.
By adopting these tools, companies can cut IT costs and flexibly scale up or down as per business requirements. An ideal cloud computing tool must-
- Have a multi-tenant cloud architecture and provide access to data on demand
- Provide live performance tracking and reporting
- Run virtualization, storage, and computing
- Be a pay-as-you-go, utilization-based, or subscription-based purchase model
- Offer application management tools
An ideal tool helps firms centralize data backups in the cloud providers’ data centers. This eliminates the need to maintain offsite and onsite backups. Moreover, it minimizes the data loss risks.
