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Enterprises need to learn more about the right steps to migrate workloads to the public cloud and thus reduce costs.

Cloud migration does not occur on its own, and work and tasks cannot be completed until the migration project is successful. One of the biggest benefits of enterprises moving their business to cloud platforms is that they can reduce work and operating costs, and one of the most important factors is the automation and configuration of cloud computing infrastructure. By automating configuration, setup, and management based on cloud computing infrastructure, organizations can free up time and resources for mission-critical innovation rather than day-to-day maintenance.

Fortunately, there are many cloud infrastructure automation tools available to help speed up the process. In addition, many related tools may also be helpful. Although no tool is suitable for all situations, this guide can help consider the benefits offered and select the advantages that best meet the cloud computing infrastructure needs of the enterprise. whether the enterprise migration is for public, private, or hybrid cloud architectures.

(1) AWS CloudFormation

To help ensure its leadership in all areas of cloud computing, Amazon's AWS CloudFormation allows users to model resources using YAML or JSON, automate them, and then deploy them in an AWS-based, cloud-based infrastructure.

If an enterprise uses or plans to use AWS-based cloud computing products, CloudFormation can help users ensure that the configuration of all teams is as simple as possible.

CloudFormation allows users to run a number of other AWS tools immediately, including Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. CloudFormation can also handle the automated management of cross-regional accounts, making it easier to extend to new locales as the business expands. CloudFormation Change Sets is a good way to preview upcoming changes before the infrastructure occurs.

If users plan to use the AWS cloud, they can use CloudFormation to accomplish as many tasks as possible.

(2) Puppet

As a long-time leader in the configuration automation market, Puppet helps some of today's largest software teams model, configure, and systematically implement the required configurations of their infrastructure. With the company's commercial product, Puppet Enterprise, users can manage all aspects of cloud-based infrastructure on an astonishing scale, from computing to storage to network resources (more than 20000 nodes can be considered for basic deployment). It is suitable for public, private, and hybrid clouds. The user writes modules in Puppet's domain-specific language (DSL), which provides code for the configuration enforced by the agents installed by the user on each node.

With Puppet Enterprise, users can get out-of-the-box orchestration and task-based command execution and multi-device management. Its GUI console can easily classify and manage all cloud computing deployed by users. Although Puppet DSL is known for spending some time learning, the benefits are likely to be huge.

Puppet maintains integrated and cooperative relationships with major vendors such as Microsoft, VMware, Google and Amazon. For example, AWS Opswork for Puppet Enterprise provides a fully integrated suite of automation tools for managing cloud-based infrastructure.

Puppet is a good automation tool for users who need tag mandatory configuration and drift remediation.

(3) Ansible

Recently protected by RedHat, Ansible is rapidly becoming the industry standard based on its easy-to-use, task-based infrastructure automation. Ansible claims that users do not need a deep background in computer science to automate, configure or orchestrate tasks in a simple language, which can be packaged in a "script". In addition, users can easily manage all aspects of the cloud computing infrastructure without having to install a single agent anywhere in the cloud computing infrastructure.

The main features of Ansible Tower (commercial products of Ansible) include job scheduling, GUI-based inventory management, multiple game workflows, and flexible REST API, allowing users to embed Ansible Tower in almost any task-based configuration management process.

The main integration includes AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware, Rackspace, Digital Ocean and Google Cloud.

Automating the configuration of tasks using Ansible may make the user's job feel a bit too easy.

(4) Chef

Chef is another senior vendor in the field of infrastructure configuration. Like Puppet, Chef provides its own DSL to help users implement everything from configuration policies to continuous delivery of production code. For Chef Automate users (Chef's business platform), you can automatically manage the AWS-based self-hosting infrastructure on an hourly basis, or use AWS Opswork to implement Chef Automate.

With Chef Automate, users have access to key features such as detailed compliance management, high availability, and GUI-based workflow pipeline creation. The main integration includes AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware and Google Cloud.

If users need compliance management, Chef is a good choice.

(5) Kubernetes

Kubernetes, originally developed by Google, is a container orchestration platform for automating the deployment, expansion, and management of containerized applications. In fact, it has become the de facto standard for container orchestration and is the flagship project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, supported by major vendors such as Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco and RedHat.

Although it is not a true infrastructure configuration management tool, Kubernetes can easily deploy and run applications based on micro-services architecture, suitable for almost any cloud. It does this by creating an abstraction layer on top of a set of hosts, where development teams can deploy their applications and have Kubernetes manage things such as controlling the resource consumption of the application or team, distributing the application load evenly across the host infrastructure, and automatically loading balanced requests.

Consider adopting container and micro-service architecture? Many people suspect that Kubernetes will one day make traditional configuration management tools completely obsolete.

(6) Terraform

Another aspect of infrastructure management is the concept of "infrastructure is code". Three industry giants, AWS, Microsoft and Google, all claim that this is a central philosophy, and Terraform is no exception. In short, Terraform is an open source tool that users can use to write declarative configuration files to create and modify infrastructure, but it is not entirely a configuration automation tool.

If the user uses the enterprise's commercial product Terraform Enterprise in a cloud-based workflow such as AWS, the user will write versioning configuration modules and declare the creation or modification of advanced resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) resources. Terraform can help users automate the configuration of these resources with a wide range of resource graphics and execution plans. However, users may still need configuration management tools such as Puppet or Chef to help them automatically set up and execute software on these resources.

The main integration of Terraform includes AWS, Google Cloud platform, Microsoft Azure Cloud platform and Oracle Cloud.

Terraform attaches great importance to "infrastructure is code". Users will get the strong and stable declarative configuration they expect.

(7) Google cloud computing deployment manager (Google Cloud Deployment Manager)

If users plan to use Google's cloud platform to build a cloud computing infrastructure, use the cloud computing deployment manager. Here, users can automatically configure and deploy Google Cloud using parallel, repeatable deployment and template-driven configurations. The cloud computing deployment manager provides a rich range of tools, from CLI and API to GUI, to manage all stages of infrastructure configuration and management, from resource creation to deletion.

(8) Microsoft AzureAutomation

Azure Automation provides cloud-based automation and configuration services that provide consistent management in both Azure and non-Azure environments. It consists of process automation, update management, and configuration capabilities designed to help users reduce errors and reduce the time it takes to deploy infrastructure. Azure Automation also provides automatic control over maintenance and compliance operations.

Most importantly, it is not only suitable for Microsoft to use Azure automation, users can use automation triggered by PowerShell or Python Runbook for heterogeneous deployment of Windows or Linux hosts.

Microsoft has clearly shown its dedication to modern DevOps practitioners. If users need to run a variety of operating systems, Azure may be a good way.

(9) Cisco Intelligent Automation Cloud platform (Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud)

Cisco offers many cloud computing products ranging from private to public to hybrid solutions. In addition to these products, the Cisco Intelligent Automated Cloud platform provides actual configuration and management from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to instances running in Cisco cloud or other cloud environments, including AWS, OpenStack, and VMware.

The main features include a self-service portal for cloud computing users, multi-tenancy and network service automation. Although Cisco explicitly creates its own cloud computing infrastructure products, the Cisco Intelligent Cloud Computing Automation platform can extend automation tools to other ecosystems.

(10) SaltStack

Initially as open source projects like Puppet and Chef, Saltstack joined the enterprise space, focusing on automated security compliance. Like Ansible, SaltStack can run without an agent (but you can also run an agent if the user's workflow requires it).

If users are interested in migrating to the cloud platform, SaltStack provides an interface to interact with cloud computing providers called Salt Cloud, so users can use Salt to configure and manage all aspects of the cloud-based infrastructure.

The main features of SaltStack include agentless node management and superior security compliance tools. It has also made important cloud integration with AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, OpenStack and Google Cloud.

Nowadays, security compliance seems to be a huge problem, so if it is a problem, maybe SaltStack is the way users want it.

(11) VMware vCenter configuration Manager (VCM)

This small portion of the VMware world helps users configure and maintain VMware cloud environments (running on vendors such as AWS and RackSpace) to meet their operational, security, and compliance requirements.

VCM provides users with a central location to control the configuration of VMware-based infrastructure, whether it runs on Windows, Linux, or Unix operating systems. Enterprises can also easily choose VMware integration, which helps to track configuration data, change data, network configuration, and compliance policies using many VMware tools, including vCenter, vCloud Director, and VMware vCloud Networking.

(12) Cfengine

CFEngine is a classic configuration management tool that has long been used to automate IT infrastructure in enterprises of all sizes. Unlike tools such as Puppet, which require a central management server, CFEngine relies on an "autonomous agent" that runs every five minutes to enforce its host configuration. Impressively, CFEngine allows users to manage up to 5000 hosts for each management server.

CFEngine integrates with the user's Amazon EC2 infrastructure.

(13) Foreman

If users need a lightweight tool to manage the entire lifecycle of the server, from bare metal to configuration to business processes, the open source Foreman project can help. Note, however, that Foreman relies on fairly deep integration with open source Puppet for node configuration management, but it also provides plug-in support for Chef, Ansible, and Salt for other management aspects.

Its dedicated open source community has an extensive library of plug-ins. Users can configure cloud computing instances using Foreman on major providers such as Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Computing, OpenStack, and VMware.

Foreman is definitely one of the options for building open source software teams.

Conclusion

Each infrastructure automation tool has its strengths, weaknesses, and learning curves. When selecting tools, users need to find the tools that best meet the needs of the project and the team. When users start a cloud migration, the tools built by cloud computing vendors may provide the easiest way, especially if users are looking for a "one-stop shop".

In other words, tools like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible have built a huge reputation for DevOps practitioners to manage infrastructure in a variety of cloud environments, as evidenced by their integration. But be sure to do your homework, because some related tools may be exactly what users need. In fact, in many cases, users may find that the best way is to combine two or more of these tools.

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