Testing and Deployment: Quality Is King - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 293

Management Tools
Cloud management tools become necessary for fairly dynamic environments. There
are many cloud management solutions that monitor and provision cloud deployments.
Although all the big companies such as IBM, CA, HP, Dell, and VMware provide their
own cloud management solutions, they are generally not recommended for a public cloud
by cloud vendors themselves. The reasons are costs, compatibility, technology lock-in, and
lack of detailed choices.
Most typically a good cloud management tool should support different cloud types,
dynamic provisioning and decommissioning of objects (servers, storage, apps), and a
management dashboard with system information. A few vendors that offer pervasive
approaches in handling provisioning and managing cloud dashboards in private, public,
and hybrid environments are listed here:
RightScale RightScale offers a free edition of its management tool with limited features
and capacity, but it's enough to test whether the solution its an organization's needs. The
product is broken into four main components: management environment, cloud-ready server
template with a deployment library, adaptable automation engine, and a multi-cloud engine
for hybrid environments.
RightScale supports large cloud vendors such as Amazon and Rackspace as well as
Eucalyptus and GoGrid.
Kaavo Kaavo is similar to RightScale and is typically used for single-click deployment
of complex multitier applications in the cloud (development, QA, or production). It also
provides other useful features, such as handling automatic cloud bursting, management of
application infrastructure, data encryption, and work-flow automation to handle runtime
production exceptions.
Kaavo supports Amazon, Rackspace, and Eucalyptus.
Zeus Traffic Controller Zeus was famous for its web server, which despite being rock solid
could never compete with Apache Tomcat and Microsoft IIS. Zeus uses its application server
expertise and traditional load balancing tools to test availability for spontaneously commis-
sioning or decommissioning instances in the cloud. Zeus currently supports Rackspace and
Amazon platforms.
Amazon CloudWatch CloudWatch works on Amazon's EC2 platform only and therefore
does not support hybrid cloud environments. However, it supports dynamic provisioning
(auto-scaling), monitoring, and load balancing. It is managed through a central manage-
ment console, the same one used by Amazon Web Services. The biggest advantage is that
an organization using Amazon's cloud infrastructure does not need to install any additional
software, nor do they need an additional website to access applications. It provides robust
functionality with the only downside being lack of hybrid support.