Cloud infrastructure: 7 interesting services and technologies (and their analogues)

More and more companies are beginning to use these or other cloud services for their needs. And the bigger the organization, the more complex the infrastructure it needs. At the same time, the creation of cloud systems and the automation of their individual functions is a difficult process, coupled with various difficulties.

To facilitate the tasks of building and automating the cloud infrastructure, various methods and software are used. In today's material - a selection of seven such tools and technologies (as well as links to competing products and analogues).
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Chef: configuration management

One of the most famous cloud automation tools. Chef is used for configuration management and continuous delivery. As written on the project website, “Chef turns the infrastructure into a code.”



Using this product, users can create “recipes” that include a set of commands and configuration commands for automating various processes in the cloud (something similar to IFTTT ). The Chef client application is installed on each server, virtual machine, or network device — each such object is called a node. Clients then contact the Chef server and receive instructions on the latest updates.

Price: The basic package, which includes 10,000 nodes, is completely free, the Standard Standard tariff costs $ 6 per month per node.

Related Tools: Puppet , Juju , Testconfig , Dell Cloud Manager

Veeam Cloud Connect: Backup to the Cloud

With the help of Veeam Cloud Connect technology, you can organize a reliable transfer of backups to the cloud (and also recover data from such copies).



Veeam Cloud Connect developers follow the “3-2-1” backup rule (three backups, two types of storage media, one copy is stored remotely), and their product is well suited to put it into practice. Supported virtualization products include VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as Microsoft SMB3 Storage, Microsoft Windows Sever and Linux servers. Here is a good article about using this technology for backup to the cloud.

Price: Veeam Backup & Replication product licenses start at $ 711 per year.

Pallet: cloud agile development

Pallet is a cloud development tool whose developers also follow the infrastructure as code approach. It can be used to automate applications, server racks, or individual virtual machines.



You can use the system to work with any virtual machine with Bash and SSH.

Price: on request

Distelli: application deployment

With the help of the Distelly service , system administrators, application developers, and other IT professionals can quickly deploy applications.



The tool can work "with any code on any server", allows you to group servers according to various criteria (roles, geographic location, provider, etc.)

Price: There is a free version (2 servers, an unlimited number of deployments), as well as paid fees, differing in the number of servers ($ 150 per month for 10 servers, $ 750 / month for 50 servers).

Related Services: Fabric , Ansible , ®? Ex , Glu

Boundary: infrastructure monitoring

The Boundary tool integrates with the products of the main cloud vendors and can be used to monitor the status of applications and data. In addition, this system is integrated with other analytics systems, which allows you to see detailed aggregated information about the state of the infrastructure at one point.



With Boundary, you can analyze system performance, examine the performance of various topologies, and even control the API.

Price: there is a free version (data storage time and number of metrics per server are limited), as well as standard ($ 12 / month per server) and advanced ($ 15 / month per server) versions

Other similar projects: Solarwinds , Hyperic , New Relic Monitor , CA Nimsoft , AppDynamics , BMC Cloud Operations Management

AutoMate: automation (without a line of code)

Created by Network Automation, AutoMate allows you to create cloud-based automated solutions without having to write code. Users can create various tasks for automation using a graphical editor:



Auto Mate (currently version 10) can be integrated with various cloud applications, as well as SharePoint, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Dynamics, FTP, Excel, various databases, etc.

Price: there is a free trial version, price for permanent use on request

Other automation services: SaltStack , CFEngine , Foreman , Commando , Cisco Prime Cloud Automation

NetApp Flash Cache: SSD Caching in the Cloud

SSD solid state drives do not have moving parts, and they use flash memory to store data. As a rule, one of the weak points of mass applications and multifunctional servers is the disk subsystem. You can speed up its work with the help of SSD caching technology.



NetApp Flash Cache (formerly PAM II) is a Flash controller at the storage controller level that allows you to store hot, frequently requested data. The main advantage here is an increase in performance for workloads with a large number of read operations (without adding additional disks).

Due to the high-performance cache for read operations, the waiting time compared to disk drives is reduced ten or more times, and the I / O bandwidth is also improved. Various practical uses of this technology are presented in this blog post .

Price: on request

Instead of output

In conclusion, there is an idea to make not only this post, but also comments to it with some kind of reminder for those who are somehow connected with cloud services. Therefore, I suggest habra users share in the comments links to their favorite tools to facilitate the creation of cloud infrastructure (then you can add to the post a separate section “recommendations of the habra community”).

Thanks for attention!

PS If you notice any inaccuracy, mistake or typo, please write a personal message and I will correct everything promptly.