Adopting the cloud must come with a management solution strategy. Cloud Management refers to all cloud environment aspects and their related tasks. Tasks include deploying, monitoring, analyzing and more. Many IT organizations today running to adopt the new disruptive cloud methodologies. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic decision, picking the right way to orchestrate your cloud resources should be an integral part of your cloud adoption strategy.
I asked Amazon support:
“I am looking for a tool that will let the ISV’s customers an option to enable an environment by themselves with a back office for its administrator to control the different customer accounts. For example for an e-learning environment that also includes rules such as the total hours enabled for a single formation/cluster that support a few hours class a day”.
AWS Support rep answered:
“We have several partners and customers that built e-learning solutions on AWS, but they are all very specific to their product/internal needs. Your description may need to be developed accordingly. As AWS is fully API based, and you have SDKs available to every development environment, most of your code will be quite generic – (similar to the way it will look on any other platform) and will just use the specific API commands to activate the needed functions within AWS.”
Learn more on the IaaS potential Lock-in
This answer didn’t really satisfied me and I found myself wondering around looking for tools to easily deploy applications over the Amazon AWS cloud and found about dozens of tools or bit more that can mostly monitor and maintain the cloud environment. Most of those applications (tools) didn’t really supported an option to deploy a complex/robust applications and the followings are the most 5 best ones I found and can suggest –
- RightScale – Maybe the most experienced vendor to manage AWS. RightScale Cloud Management provide capabilities like design, deploy, and manage applications across multiple public or private clouds. RightScale have a strong relationships with Amazon AWS. Upon all of those the ISV need to engage with their development team and a professional services effort will be included.
- Enstratus – Seems to be the most usefull “sign-up & play cloud tool” that gives you “single pane of glass” to put you in full control of your cloud platforms including monitor, auto-scale, auto recovery, auto backup and SSL certificates maintenance. The system UI is friendly in relation to the other systems in this article. I suggest to try their free trial.
- MadeiraCloud, a new cloud management player. MadeiraCloud’s unique and interesting cloud management service enables drag and drop tools to allow users quickly and easily design, provision, manage and monitor cloud infrastructure resources. The company also announced full support for Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
- Scalr – Scalr monitors all your servers for crashes, and replaces any that fail. To ensure you never lose any data, Scalr backups your data at regular intervals and uses Amazon EBS for database storage. Sclar include simple capabilities and good UI for fast applications deployment.
- Scalarium – The application support LAMP applications and from the demo it looks nice and simple. I am not sure about auto-scaling though they declare that they do support that.
I find that this market evolving however still very young and lack with supporting the ISV (as a major IaaS consumer),with basic capabilities that will help easy, fast and more importantly – cost effective deployment to provision its applications.
