What are the Best Tools to Manage Your Apps in the Cloud?

Kubernetes

Because all the apps are available through an open-source framework, it's straightforward to handle your app across all the platforms in the most efficient way. Each host that hosts your app is a container, which is a piece of software that runs on its own.

You can split your app into multiple containers and run all of them on the same host. In this way, you separate the backend and the frontend of your application.

Once you deploy your containers to your host, you need to run these containers inside Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a system that manages and runs all the containers on the server.

Kubernetes uses another tool called a resource scheduler to coordinate the containers, update the kernel, and fill it. This second tool is a compelling feature to handle your apps in the Cloud.

Virtual Machine Monitoring

To monitor your application at all its life-cycle stages, you need a tool to run in every environment. What if you have to manage your apps on any other platform as well? You need to choose a monitoring tool for every environment! 

Most cloud vendors and open source projects offer tools for monitoring across the life-cycle. These standard tools scan your apps and log everything that happens. You can access the logs from anywhere you are. It's swift and easy to access, and it keeps the logs for every step of your app's life cycle.

Deployment Tools

When you deploy your applications to the Cloud, you need a tool to set up the next deployment environment. This is a critical stage of the process. You need a tool that will help you with each step of your deployment.

Deployment Tools are tools to keep the servers from getting corrupted, unplugged, or not connected to the network for some reason. They are also for configuring everything you have to do to run a deployment.

The deployment tool for a simple deployment process is Nginx. With Nginx, you can make your website, a static site, mobile app, cloud client. The deployment tool for a complicated deployment process is Docker. 

What if you have to manage your apps in every environment? With Docker, you can run a single monolithic app and manage many containers running in your clusters.

Docker is one of the most popular tools for deploying multiple applications on cloud platforms. Docker is most commonly used for deployments. The most popular tool for deploying multi-container applications is Kubernetes.

Cloud Management Software

With all that said, there is an upper bound to what tools can do. If you are using an open-source tool like OpenStack, you can't fully automate your environment. For instance, while Chef or Puppet can do an excellent job of managing your servers, it can't fully automate your web applications. That's why AWS recommends using CloudFront to handle your web properties, and other clouds refer to this service as "cloud content delivery."

You need to pay attention to whether your cloud provider offers a similar tool. Except for Amazon, which has expanded to offer nearly any tool you could imagine, most cloud providers limit the number of third party tools they offer to two. In Amazon's case, their primary two are their own Elastic Beanstalk and the OpenStack Envoy.

To best manage your Cloud, you need to look closely at your cloud provider's toolset. For instance, if your cloud provider does not allow for extensibility, you can avoid costly errors by using tools that support the OpenStack API rather than trying to write and maintain your own.

Conclusion

The challenge that faces you in cloud solutions is complexity. The tools listed above act as a base guideline you can use to start managing your Cloud published solutions. As your Cloud becomes more complex, you will want to explore additional services to manage your published apps. The goal is to have your environment work itself. This is known as Infrastructure as Code.

If you would like to amplify your cloud computing skills, take a look at the Post Graduate Program in Cloud Computing offered by Caltech CTME in collaboration with Simplilearn.  This comprehensive program will let you earn certification as a cloud architect, engineer, or administrator with hands-on experience with the three major cloud platforms (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform).