Essential AWS Tools for Cloud Management in 2025: Top Picks

AWS Control Services

AWS offers several control services that help organizations manage their cloud infrastructure efficiently with proper security and compliance. These services provide centralized control and protect against unauthorized actions. Effective auditing and risk management are added benefits of AWS control services.

1. AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations make the centralized administration of AWS accounts possible. Service Control Policies (SCPs), which establish administrative boundaries, give it control. It helps keep multiple accounts in your organization consistent and secure by organizing them, establishing governance boundaries, and ensuring permissions are set correctly.

2. AWS Control Tower

AWS Control Tower automates the setup and administration of a safe, multi-account AWS environment. For this, it incorporates preventive and investigative controls into account provisioning throughout the governance, security, and compliance loop. Control Tower offers centralized policy management, ensuring AWS accounts comply with best practices and organizational guidelines.

3. AWS Security Hub

AWS Security Hub gives you an integrated view of your security posture. It collects, prioritizes, and makes actionable security findings across AWS services. The service assists you in detecting and lessening potential threats. It uses services like GuardDuty and Inspector. Therefore, a faster remediation and proactive management of your AWS environment is possible. AWS Security Hub is also employed to provide security management services.

4. Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty detects all sorts of unauthorized and fraudulent behavior in your AWS environment. It is a very efficient threat detection service. It makes use of machine learning and integrated threat intelligence. The tool analyzes data from AWS CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs. You get great assistance safeguarding the stored data and workloads as it spots threats in real-time. This service is also used in AWS security management services.

5. Amazon Macie

Amazon Macie provides you with continuous visibility into the security of your data and privacy stored in your S3 buckets. AWS Macie automatically and continuously monitors your S3 buckets and notifies you of any unencrypted buckets, publicly accessible buckets, or buckets shared with AWS accounts outside those you defined in AWS Organizations.

6. AWS Config

Your AWS resource configurations are continuously monitored and recorded by AWS Config. It also lets you check compliance and audit. You can assess the degree to which your configurations adhere to internal policies and standards using predefined rules or pre-built conformance packs. Config facilitates a smooth audit for security and regulatory use cases and aids in identifying configuration drift and establishing governance at the level.

7. AWS Audit Manager

The AWS Audit Manager controls the process of auditing and controlling risk and compliance in your AWS environment. It keeps audit trails for regulations, solves compliance assessments, and quickens evidence gathering. Audit Manager makes audits more effective and guarantees ongoing obedience to compliance frameworks by assisting organizations in monitoring their AWS usage.

AWS Network Connectivity Management Tools

These AWS tools for network connectivity management are meant to support creating, monitoring, and managing secure, scalable, and efficient network infrastructures within AWS.

1. Amazon VPC

Amazon VPC allows you to launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network. You can control the selection of IP addresses, subnet creation, route tables, and network gateways. This ensures secure and efficient communication between resources within your AWS environment, whether in a single or multi-account setup.

2. Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM)

Amazon VPC IPAM simplifies the management of AWS workloads using IP addresses by automating planning and tracking within IP address monitoring. The network IP assignment can be easily managed. IPAM ensures effective use of address space for efficient scalability and organization by managing IP addresses across your entire AWS environment.

3. AWS Transit Gateway

Different cloud connectivities become easy with AWS Transit Gateway. Using a hub-and-spoke architecture, it simplifies network administration and offers a central location for traffic inspection. It supports multi-account strategies and merges with AWS Control Tower for easier deployment and connectivity management across AWS environments.

4. AWS Direct Connect

AWS Direct Connect uses a dedicated, fast network connection to link your on-premises infrastructure to AWS. AWS Direct Connect offers more reliable and consistent performance by avoiding the Internet. Large data transfers and mission-critical applications are two workloads that can significantly benefit from their low latency and high throughput.

5. AWS VPN

AWS VPNs provide safe connections between on-premises networks, remote offices, and its global network. There are two services, namely AWS Site-to-Site VPN and AWS Client VPN. They provide highly available, managed, and elastic cloud VPN solutions.

6. AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager

AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager reduces the complexity of managing global networks. Registering Transit Gateways and on-premises resources allows you to visualize, monitor, and optimize network performance across multiple AWS regions. The centralized dashboard provides a comprehensive view of streamlined network architecture management.

7. AWS Network Firewall

AWS Network Firewall provides granular control over network traffic, offering advanced features like domain filtering and intrusion prevention. It scales automatically with your network’s demands and integrates with AWS Transit Gateway to manage firewalls centrally across multiple VPCs, ensuring secure, high-performance internet-to-cloud connectivity.

8. AWS Firewall Manager

AWS Firewall Manager organizes the administration of firewall rules throughout multiple AWS accounts and VPCs. It guarantees uniform security policies across your cloud environment by streamlining rule deployment, compliance monitoring, and protection deployment for AWS resources. AWS Network Firewall and Firewall Manager are integrated to provide unified security management.

Relevant Read: AWS’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

9. AWS VPC Reachability Analyzer

The VPC Reachability Analyzer can help you examine network connectivity among source and destination resources in your AWS VPCs. It offers a thorough hop-by-hop analysis to ensure network paths are adequately optimized. It detects disconnections caused by configuration errors in security groups, route tables, and ACLs.

10. Amazon Inspector Network Reachability

Amazon Inspector’s Network Reachability package analyzes EC2 network configurations to identify security vulnerabilities. It detects open ports and misconfigured access controls, such as overly permissive security groups or internet gateways. This tool automates network security assessments, helping you proactively secure your instances and network configurations without additional scanning overhead.

AWS Identity Services

AWS's Identity Services help you know your partner, customer, and employee identities. The various options include:

1. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

The AWS IAM option is useful if you plan to have a clear-cut command over services and resources. With customizable IAM policies, administrators can use least privilege access to manage identities securely by defining who can access what and under what circumstances.

2. AWS IAM Access Analyzer

IAM Access Analyzer automates the creation of fine-grained policies and uses policy validation to help improve permissions. Enabling functionally secure, least privileged configurations requires constant public and cross-account resource access monitoring.

3. AWS IAM Identity Center

Managing user access to business apps and AWS accounts is made easier with the IAM Identity Center. It simplifies identity management for AWS Organizations and well-known business tools with single sign-on (SSO), centralized permissions management, and pre-built integrations.

4. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory

Managed by AWS Microsoft AD provides fully managed Active Directory services via AWS. It merges with directory-aware workloads in the cloud by supporting native AD features such as group policy and SSO without data synchronization.

5. AD Connector

AD Connector facilitates easy integration with Microsoft Active Directory on-premises. As a directory gateway, it enables safe directory request rerouting without data caching and efficiently scales to satisfy workload and application performance demands.

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AWS Security Management Services

The security management services by AWS help you meet the prescribed benefits of the M&G Guide. The following AWS tools, plus the AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty, are all included in this category:

1. Amazon Detective

Amazon Detective uses machine learning and graph theory to analyze AWS logs, making security investigations easier. It builds a connected dataset that aids security teams in identifying the underlying causes of problems and effectively countering risks.

2. AWS Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager uses preset workflows to automate security operations. It improves operational security across AWS accounts and resources by assisting with patch management, fixing configuration errors, and automating vulnerability responses.

3. AWS Security Hub Automated Response

This tool integrates automated remediation playbooks with AWS Security Hub. Using pre-established workflows, IAM roles, Lambda functions, and Step Functions accelerates incident response to address security concerns in single- or multi-account configurations.

AWS Service Management Tools

The AWS service management tools are meant to help organizations efficiently manage and govern their cloud environments.

1. AWS Systems Manager Explorer

This fully customizable dashboard offers information about AWS environments' performance and operational wellness. Assembling data from accounts and regions helps set priorities and effectively address problems.

2. AWS Systems Manager Change Manager

Change Manager detects conflicts and ensures smooth implementation when streamlining adjustments with pre-approved workflows. It offers reports for improved configuration and infrastructure change management, governance, and visibility.

3. AWS Config

AWS Config provides detective controls to track, document, and assess AWS resource configurations. It makes tracking configuration history and resource relationships possible and guarantees compliance by automating the evaluation of configurations against the rules.

4. Service Catalog

The Service Catalog makes the centralized administration of authorized AWS software and services possible. It promotes governance by restricting user permissions to carefully chosen products, maintaining compliance, and enabling effective resource deployment.

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AWS Observability Tools

The list of AWS tools below enables monitoring, tracing, and visualizing performance across applications and infrastructure. 

1. AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail thoroughly documents your AWS API activities across all services. It logs actions from the AWS Management Console, SDKs, and CLI to facilitate auditing, compliance inspections, and security monitoring. Logs are kept in one central location for effective analysis.

2. Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch provides full observability and monitoring for on-premises and AWS resources. It gathers and examines logs, metrics, and events to monitor performance, maximize resources, and preserve operational health. Dashboards offer consolidated information about services, assets, and applications.

3. AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray assists developers in analyzing and debugging their production and development applications. It traces requests as they flow through services to help identify performance bottlenecks and root causes of failures. The tool is designed for microservices architectures to provide visualized maps of components for quick resolution and performance optimization.

4. Amazon Managed Grafana

Using Amazon Managed Grafana, teams can view, query, and correlate observability data from multiple sources, such as metrics, logs, and traces. It works well with AWS, automating server scaling and setup and enhancing analysis with alerts and SSO.

5. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus

Amazon Managed Service uses PromQL for Prometheus to gather and query metrics from containerized environments. It reduces the need for infrastructure management by providing safe and effective monitoring for Kubernetes, ECS, and other container platforms, and it automatically scales to meet workload demands.

6. Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon OpenSearch Service makes data visualization, log analytics, and real-time application monitoring easier. Its configurable architecture enables quick data indexing and querying. Integrating with OpenSearch Dashboards makes data exploration easier for users who manage big, complicated datasets across workloads.

"AWS remains the best in the world at creating cloud infrastructure and the tools surrounding it." — Timothy Horan and Jason Helfstein, Oppenheimer analysts.

AWS Cloud Financial Management Services and Tools

These AWS tools collectively enhance cost visibility, control, and optimization, enabling organizations to achieve efficient financial management on AWS. These serve as the AWS cost optimization tools.

1. AWS Cost & Usage Report

The AWS Cost & Usage Report provides a detailed view of your AWS usage and costs. It includes pricing, services, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans metadata. It is a foundational tool for creating informed cost controls and optimizing expenses.

2. AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer allows you to visualize and analyze costs and usage patterns across AWS resources. You can forecast expenses, identify trends, and receive Reserved Instance recommendations, enabling better financial planning and optimization over the past or upcoming 12 months.

3. AWS Cost Allocation Tags

Cost allocation tags help categorize and track your AWS expenses. AWS offers user-defined and AWS-generated tags, providing a straightforward way to organize costs by projects, departments, or services, improving resource tracking and financial accountability.

4. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

Machine learning is used by the AWS Cost Anomaly Detection tool to find unforeseen spending trends. It helps avoid accidental overspending and maintains budgetary discipline by identifying irregularities in expense and usage data and can provide timely alerts.

5. AWS Budgets

With AWS Budgets, you can create and keep track of cost, usage, RI, and savings plan budgets. Get alerts when threshold values are passed or are expected to be surpassed. Budgets can be integrated with AWS Chatbot and Cost Explorer for more in-depth cost insights and automation.

6. AWS Cost Categories

Custom grouping of cost and usage data into useful classifications is made possible by AWS Cost Categories. Depending on the structure of your company, you can establish rules-based categories that make tracking expenses easier and allow for more accurate financial analysis.

7. Tag Policies and Tag Editor

Tag policies standardize resource tagging across accounts and ensure consistent cost management and governance. AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor simplifies managing tags across multiple resources, improving cost categorization and operational efficiency.

8. AWS License Manager

Software license management for on-premises and AWS environments is centralized with AWS License Manager. It gives you visibility and control over the software licenses used by your company. It guarantees adherence to licensing terms, reduces overages, and also streamlines account tracking.

9. AWS Compute Optimizer

AWS Compute Optimizer uses machine learning to suggest the best settings for Lambda functions, EBS volumes, and EC2 instances. It lowers expenses and strengthens resource performance by examining past usage.

10. AWS Application Cost Profiler

AWS Application Cost Profiler provides detailed cost breakdowns by tenant and monitors how applications use shared resources. This tool is crucial for SaaS providers who want to efficiently assess and distribute shared infrastructure expenses.

11. AWS Billing Conductor

AWS Billing Conductor simplifies the chargeback and showback processes for AWS Solution Providers and enterprise clients. Provide transparency and precise cost allocation by tailoring billing and usage reports to match customer-specific pricing.

AWS Sourcing and Distribution Tools

These AWS tools collectively enhance resource distribution, compliance, and operational efficiency across AWS environments.

1. AWS Service Catalog

Organizations can generate, administer, and disseminate IT service catalogs using the AWS Service Catalog. These catalogs cover whole multi-tier architectures, software, and virtual machines. They allow users to implement authorized services while effectively guaranteeing uniform governance and compliance.

2. AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace provides many storage, networking, and security software listings. Users can quickly locate, evaluate, buy, and install third-party software on AWS. This, in turn, simplifies the process of acquiring and integrating the required AWS tools.

3. AWS Private Marketplace

Organizations can create personalized catalogs of authorized third-party software from the AWS Marketplace using the AWS Private Marketplace. This permits users to implement tested solutions suited to organizational requirements while guaranteeing adherence to internal policies.

4. Managed Entitlements with AWS License Manager

The distribution and activation of software licenses acquired via the AWS Marketplace are made easier by managed entitlements. Administrators can guarantee effective license usage and reduce repetitive or unnecessary purchases by automating license provisioning across accounts.

5. AWS Solutions Library

For both technical and business problems, the AWS Solutions Library offers pre-tested solutions. Users can utilize AWS Solutions Constructs, Reference Architectures, Implementations, and Consulting Offers to deploy or create well-architected applications suited to particular requirements.

6. AWS Quick Starts

Automated deployment accelerators known as AWS Quick Starts adhere to AWS best practices. They facilitate quickly deploying widely used technologies by simplifying intricate processes into small steps. CloudFormation templates and comprehensive documentation are included with every Quick Start.

7. Service Catalog Getting Started Library

Within the AWS Management Console, this library offers well-architected, pre-configured templates. Users can copy and modify these templates to speed up the creation of standardized environments for multi-account provisioning.

8. AWS Professional Services and Partners

AWS Professional Services and Built on Control Tower Partners provide expert assistance in incorporating foundational and advanced configurations. These services enable businesses to get the most out of AWS's sourcing and distribution capabilities.

Conclusion

Knowledge of the AWS tools is a boon today, as there are several job roles for individuals in the industry. Moreover, several public and private sector organizations are searching for skilled candidates. So, it is time to upskill and grab lucrative job opportunities.

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FAQs

1. How many tools does AWS have?

AWS is a cloud-based platform that has over 200 fully featured services.

2. Which software is used in AWS?

There is not one single software used in AWS, but there is a combination of proprietary technologies and open-source software. Some key software and technologies used by AWS are as follows:

Proprietary AWS Technologies:

1. Compute: EC2 (KVM, Xen), Lambda (Docker)
2. Storage: S3 (Distributed Storage), EBS (RAID-based block storage)
3. Databases: RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL), DynamoDB (NoSQL)
4. Networking: VPC (SDN), Route 53 (DNS)
5. Security: IAM (Policy-based Access), KMS (Encryption Management)
6. Monitoring: CloudWatch (Monitoring)
7. Direct Connectivity: Direct Connect (Dedicated Network)

Open-Source Software:

1. OS: Linux (Amazon Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu)
2. Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes
3. Big Data: Hadoop, Spark, Kafka
4. Machine Learning: TensorFlow
5. Encryption: OpenSSL
6. Web Server: Nginx
7. Databases: MySQL (RDS)

3. What is AWS used for?

AWS provides various cloud computing services for building and running applications. The services can include infrastructure, emerging technologies, AWS developer tools, AWS management tools, IoT, and security. AWS also enables businesses to scale with changing requirements through its on-demand and pay-as-you-go pricing.

4. Does AWS require coding?

No, coding is unnecessary when using Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS allows you to do a lot of basic tasks without having to know any coding skills. However, knowing how to code can be helpful and even necessary for more complex use cases. One can learn the basics and slowly advance via top AWS certification training sessions.

5. What is the salary of AWS?

There are several different AWS roles, and salaries vary depending on an individual’s experience, location, organization, and other certifications. For instance, AWS Solutions Architects in the US make an entry-level salary of $138,000 annually. The average annual compensation for an AWS Senior Solutions Architect is $276,000.