Today, nearly every organization relies on integrated compute, storage, and networking capabilities to support their global operations, whether through on-premise data centers or major cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Managing, segmenting, and distributing these resources is a complex but essential task. This is driving the growth of automation solutions that streamline and automate the processes involved in managing cloud resources.
What we will cover:
Before diving into the tools, let’s first explore the significance of orchestration and automation.
Cloud automation involves automating individual tasks or processes to consistently achieve a desired outcome. Cloud orchestration, on the other hand, is the process of coordinating and managing these automated tasks to create a larger, more cohesive IT workflow.
Both play an important role. In this post, we will look at tools that help organizations achieve seamless automation capabilities.
A cloud automation tool automates tasks and processes in cloud environments — such as provisioning, scaling, and managing resources. It streamlines repetitive tasks, improves efficiency, reduces errors, and ensures consistency across cloud infrastructure.
These tools can integrate with platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, allowing teams to manage resources using scripts, templates, or workflows. Examples of such tools include Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, and Chef.
We have divided the cloud automation tools into the categories below based on their use case:
- Cloud infrastructure automation: Tools used to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of cloud resources — compute, storage, and network devices.
- Configuration management: Tools that help configure the cloud infrastructure components in a certain way. This is important, as it helps provide appropriate and secure runtime environments that are executed on the provisioned infrastructure.
- Monitoring: Tools that assist in automating the monitoring of various applications and services.
- Security and compliance: Tools that perform automatic security checks based on predefined policies. They also enable easy tracing of incidents for resolution.
We will introduce each tool listed at a high level, explain its features and architectural components, highlight its advantages, and mention alternatives.
The list of the top cloud automation tools includes:
Automating cloud infrastructure management has many benefits. It improves reliability by ensuring consistent provisioning of infrastructure components and is essential for scaling, as it enables organizations to quickly and accurately replicate environments. Additionally, it’s a cost-effective, time-saving approach that reduces the likelihood of errors in managing infrastructure.
Spacelift is not exactly a cloud automation tool, but it takes cloud automation and orchestration to the next level. It is a platform designed to manage infrastructure-as-code tools such as OpenTofu, Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Pulumi, Ansible, and Terragrunt, allowing teams to use their favorite tools without compromising functionality or efficiency.
Advantages
Spacelift provides a unified interface for deploying, managing, and controlling cloud resources across various providers. Still, it is API-first, so whatever you can do in the interface, you could do via the API, the CLI it offers, or even the OpenTofu/Terraform provider.
The platform enhances collaboration among DevOps teams, streamlines workflow management, and enforces governance across all infrastructure deployments. Spacelift’s dashboard provides visibility into the state of your infrastructure, enabling real-time monitoring and decision-making, and it can also detect and remediate drift.
You can leverage your favorite VCS (GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket/Azure DevOps), and executing multi-IaC workflows is a question of simply implementing dependencies and sharing outputs between your configurations.
a. Key features
- Multi-IaC workflow
- Stack dependencies: You can create dependencies between stacks and pass outputs from one to another to build an environment promotion pipeline more easily.
- Unlimited policies and integrations: Spacelift allows you to implement any type of guardrails and integrate with any tool you want. You can control the number of approvals you need for a run, which resources can be created, which parameters those resources can have, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications data.
- High flexibility: You can customize what happens before and after runner phases, bring your own image, and even modify the default workflow commands.
- Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints: You can define infrastructure templates that are easily deployed. These templates can have policies/integrations/contexts/drift detection embedded inside them for reliable deployment.
- Drift detection & remediation: Ensure the reliability of your infrastructure by detecting and remediating drift.
License/pricing: Commercial with a free tier for up to two seats
Website: https://spacelift.io
Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows you to define, provision, and manage cloud resources using a declarative language. It lets teams describe their entire infrastructure in human-readable configuration files, making it easy to version, share, and reuse across multiple projects by integrating with source control.
Terraform is cloud-agnostic, supporting all major cloud providers, and its functionality can be extended by creating custom modules.
a. Key features
Terraform’s key feature is its declarative approach to infrastructure management. You define the desired state, and Terraform internally determines the necessary steps to be executed to achieve the desired state. It creates and confirms the execution plan and only implements the change if it exists.
It also offers modularity so that you can create reusable components consistently. A state file maintained by Terraform itself manages information related to the real-world provisioned components using Terraform. This enables team collaboration.
License: BSL
Website: https://www.terraform.io
b. Architecture
Terraform’s architecture comprises several key components: the core, providers, and the state backend. The core handles the execution of configuration files and manages the system’s state. Providers are modules installed during the initialization phase, corresponding to each cloud provider or third-party platform in use. You can also create custom providers, adding flexibility by allowing you to organize and encapsulate resource groups in a modular way.
Advantages
The cloud-agnostic nature of Terraform is highly beneficial as it enables you to manage cloud resources spread across multiple cloud accounts. This avoids complexities associated with vendor lock-in and facilitates easy management of multicloud setups.
With Terraform, you can easily introduce standardization in projects. The robust community ecosystem offers various providers and modules through the Terraform registry, improving the time to delivery and helping with automation.
OpenTofu is an open-source alternative to Terraform that focuses on community-driven development and maintaining an open-source identity. It was created as a response to HashiCorp’s change to BSL and is developed under the Linux Foundation’s umbrella. This involvement with the Linux Foundation demonstrates credibility and fosters a collaborative environment for continuous innovation and improvement in the field of IaC.
a. Key features
Same features as Terraform, plus:
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- State encryption – the ability to encrypt the state and ensure your secrets stay safe
- Early variable and local validation in module sources and the terraform block
- Its open-source nature means the community’s voice is heard, and contributions are valued.
License: MPL2.0 (open source)
Website: https://opentofu.org
Advantages
OpenTofu offers similar advantages to Terraform. However, its open-source nature means the community’s voice is heard and contributions are valued.
Pulumi is an open-source tool that enables users to define, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure. What sets it apart is how infrastructure is defined. Unlike Terraform, Pulumi allows you to use familiar programming languages to describe infrastructure.
It supports languages like Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, .NET, and more, making it much easier to learn. This reduces the learning curve drastically while providing the ability to spin infrastructure components on various cloud platforms.
a. Features
One of the key benefits of using Pulumi is the ability to define infrastructure using familiar programming languages. Developers can take advantage of existing libraries, tools, and practices to boost productivity. Pulumi supports reusable components through modules, encouraging code reuse and consistency across projects.
Pulumi also offers robust state management ensuring that the current state of infrastructure is accurately tracked and managed, which is very important for collaboration and incrementally updating the infrastructure.
License: Apache 2.0 (open source)
Website: https://www.pulumi.com
b. Architecture
Pulumi’s architecture includes several key components: the Pulumi SDKs in your preferred programming language, the Pulumi CLI, and Pulumi Cloud. The SDKs allow developers to define infrastructure using familiar programming languages, while the CLI is used to run Pulumi programs that actually provision the infrastructure.
Pulumi Cloud serves as the default state management solution and offers various continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) integrations. It also supports third-party state management if needed.
Advantages
Pulumi is not only cloud-agnostic but also language-agnostic, making it highly beneficial for development teams. It supports multicloud environments, helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in.
Its robust state management and collaboration features enhance teamwork and make tracking infrastructure changes more efficient. In addition to serving as a CI/CD platform, Pulumi Cloud can also enforce security and compliance policies.
AWS CloudFormation is an IaC service provided by AWS for AWS. You can define infrastructure using declarative templates, which can be reused for multiple projects. The templates are written in JSON or YAML formats. CloudFormation templates are created to provision resources like EC2 instances, RDS databases, and any other type of service provided by AWS.
a. Features
If all your infrastructure requirements are contained in AWS, CloudFormation might be a good choice for a comprehensive IaC solution. You can leverage its UI to model and manage infrastructure components for a given stack/application.
It automates the provisioning process, making sure that resources are created in a safe, repeatable manner.
It also supports rollbacks for reverting the recent changes and automatically reverts the changes in case of errors before exiting the execution.
License: AWS proprietary
Website: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
b. Architecture
AWS CloudFormation revolves around templates and stacks. A CloudFormation template is a text file that defines the AWS resource and its properties. This template is used to create a stack. CloudFormation provisions and configures the stack, which represents a collection of AWS resources managed as a single unit.
Developers can interact with CloudFormation through a management console, APIs, or CLI. It is a native service, so it also integrates with SNS to provide real-time updates on the provisioning activities it executes.
Advantages
AWS CloudFormation simplifies AWS infrastructure management by automating provisioning, thus saving time and reducing the possibility of human errors. CloudFormation’s ability to replicate infrastructure across multiple regions ensures high availability and disaster recovery. CloudFormation templates can be maintained using the version control system.
Other cloud platforms should also provide native IaC/infrastructure management solutions.
- Azure Resource Manager: Azure Resource Manager is the deployment service for MS Azure that offers several benefits, including the ability to deploy, manage, and monitor all the resources for your solution.
- Google Cloud Deployment Manager: Similarly, Google Cloud Deployment Manager is a service for managing Google Cloud resources. Ansible is another cloud-agnostic example capable of managing IaC.
Before running business applications on the provisioned infrastructure, it’s often necessary to install additional software components and patches on the servers. These may include security tools, environment variables, configuration files, and dependency packages, all of which fall under configuration management.
In this section, we’ll explore some common configuration management tools.
Ansible is a cloud automation tool primarily used for configuration management. It simplifies application deployment by automating a wide range of IT tasks. Configuration files in Ansible define system setups and tasks, which are often executed through the command line across multiple target servers. Being agentless, Ansible uses SSH or WinRM to communicate with hosts and execute commands.
a. Features
Simplicity, ease of use, security, and reliability are the core features of Ansible.
Configurations are written in human-readable YAML files, making it easy for administrators without programming experience to understand them. These YAML files are also referred to as playbooks.
Ansible supports a wide range of modules for various tasks, from system configuration to cloud resource management. Its idempotent nature ensures that running the same playbook multiple times will produce consistent results, even if some components are only partially provisioned.
Ansible also features a robust inventory management system, allowing users to efficiently organize and manage numerous target systems.
License: Apache 2.0 (open source)
Website: https://www.ansible.com
b. Architecture
Some of the key components of Ansible include its core, modules, inventories, playbooks, and roles.
- A playbook is a set of tasks that defines a system’s desired state. Ansible’s core is responsible for interpreting and executing these playbooks.
- Modules are individual units of code that Ansible uses to configure remote nodes during execution.
- Roles allow you to organize and share reusable components across your infrastructure while also implementing role-based access control.
Additionally, you can extend Ansible’s functionality by developing custom plugins to create new integrations.
Advantages
The agentless architecture of Ansible simplifies connectivity to remote hosts. The use of YAML playbooks lowers the learning curve for developers. The extensive library of modules developed by the active community helps teams avoid wasting time on reinventing the wheel.
Ansible is a flexible tool that can manage all types of environments, whether on-prem or cloud provider-based.
Puppet is a configuration management and automation tool that simplifies the management of infrastructure. Users define the desired state of their systems with a declarative language, and Puppet automatically ensures this state is applied across the entire infrastructure. It’s widely used for tasks like provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and patch management across multiple operating systems and cloud platforms.
a. Features
A declarative language allows developers to define the desired state of a system and is idempotent, ensuring consistent outcomes. It offers features like resource abstraction, dependency management, and modularity, which help developers organize and configure reusable modules efficiently.
Puppet also includes reporting and logging features that are valuable for monitoring. Its functionality can be extended through custom functions and integrations with various third-party tools.
License: Open-source (Apache 2.0) + Commercial version Puppet Enterprise
Website: https://www.puppet.com
b. Architecture
Puppet uses a server-agent model in which the server holds configuration files that define the desired state. Agents, which typically run on independent nodes, retrieve these configurations from the server. They collect information about the current state of their respective nodes and report it back to the server.
Based on this information, the Puppet server compiles a catalog outlining the desired state for each node and sends it to the agents. The agents then apply the catalog to their target servers, ensuring that the current configuration aligns with the desired state defined by the server.
Advantages
Puppet ensures consistency across systems, reduces configuration drift, and enhances compliance. It is easy to scale and operate and supportsr both multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.
Additionally, the modular design leverages community-built modules from Puppet Forge, accelerating development. Lastly, its reporting and auditing features offer valuable insights into the IT landscape, enabling efficient tracebacks.
Chef is a configuration management tool used to automate the deployment, configuration, and management of infrastructure and applications. It allows developers to define IaC, ensuring consistent and repeatable deployments across different environments, including on-premises data centers.
What distinguishes Chef from other configuration management tools is its procedural approach, which makes it well-suited for handling complex requirements.
a. Features
Chef uses the Ruby programming language to define custom steps for configuration management, making them reusable and testable. The code or programs written for Chef are referred to as recipes.
Chef supports cross-platform management, allowing diverse environments to be managed with a single tool. Despite its procedural approach, it is inherently idempotent, ensuring a consistent state. Additionally, Chef provides dependency and relationship management, which ensures that tasks are executed in the correct order during each run.
License: Apache 2.0 (open source)
Website: https://www.chef.io/products/chef-infrastructure-management
b. Architecture
Chef consists of three main components: the Chef server, Chef clients (nodes), and workstations. The server acts as a central hub that stores cookbooks, policies, and metadata about the nodes it manages. Chef clients are the servers being managed.
Chef uses a periodic pull mechanism, where clients check in with the server to compare their current state against the desired state and apply any necessary changes.
Workstations are used by administrators to create, test, and upload cookbooks to the Chef server.
Advantages
The “configuration as code” approach in Chef promotes team collaboration through version control systems. Chef benefits from a highly active community, with numerous contributed cookbooks available for a wide range of tasks.
One of Chef’s biggest advantages is its built-in test-driven approach, which allows developers to validate configurations before applying them. This reduces production errors and improves overall reliability. Additionally, Chef offers reporting and compliance features to help maintain robust security measures
There are many configuration management tools available on the market today. A couple of notable alternatives are Rudder and SaltStack.
- Rudder: Rudder is primarily used for compliance automation and is based on CFEngine. It provides a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to define compliance requirements as policies, allowing the application of these policies to scale across multiple systems.
- SaltStack: SaltStack is a configuration management tool with a SecOps approach that sets it apart. It supports hybrid environments and can work in both agentless and agent-based modes.
Although monitoring and observability tools track the infrastructure and applications, they don’t typically take any actions themselves.
This means that, strictly speaking, they are not a “complete” cloud automation solution. However, when combined with infrastructure and configuration management tools and security and compliance automation solutions (as discussed in the next section), they can significantly enhance the scalability of automation workflows.
Datadog is a comprehensive monitoring and analytics solution that offers full-stack observability for cloud environments. It enables teams to collect, process, and visualize metrics, logs, and traces across the entire technology stack.
Datadog operates at the infrastructure, application, and service levels, helping teams make data-driven decisions. These insights can also be integrated into automation solutions, supporting the move toward a “self-healing” IT landscape.
a. Features
Datadog supports over 500 integrations, including those for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, all in a unified platform. It offers real-time dashboards, alerting, and anomaly detection, enabling teams to quickly identify issues and take action.
The Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and distributed tracing features help developers better understand application behavior and pinpoint performance bottlenecks. Once identified, these issues can be addressed by, for instance, allocating additional resources to improve application performance.
Pricing: Subscription-based with a free tier
Website: https://www.datadoghq.com/
b. Architecture
Datadog comprises several key components, including the Agent, cloud-based backend, user interface (UI), and APIs.
- The Agent is a lightweight piece of software that collects metrics and logs from host servers and streams them to the cloud-based backend.
- The backend stores and processes this data, making it available for analytics and visualization.
Datadog also uses a tagging system that helps group logs generated across various nodes at the service level for end-to-end tracking.
Datadog’s APIs are perhaps its most important feature in the context of this post. These APIs allow users to extend Datadog’s functionality by integrating it with other automation solutions and sharing valuable insights.
Advantages
The unified, full-stack approach makes multiple monitoring tool subscriptions unnecessary. Datadog’s scalability enables it to handle large volumes of data from complex, distributed systems.
With machine learning-based features like anomaly detection and forecasting, teams can take proactive measures to prevent downtime. Additionally, the robust alerting system, incident management, and API integrations enable faster and more automated problem resolution.
Amazon CloudWatch is a cloud-platform-specific monitoring tool, offering comprehensive monitoring and observability for AWS services and on-premises resources. It allows users to collect, track, and analyze metrics, logs, and events from cloud resources, providing actionable insights. As a central platform for monitoring within the AWS ecosystem, it plays a key role in ensuring efficient cloud operations.
a. Features
Amazon CloudWatch provides good alerting capabilities, allowing admins and developers to set up alarms based on the metric thresholds and trigger automated workflows or notifications.
It also integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Auto Scaling, for dynamic resource management. Additionally, its integration with EventBridge allows for more complex trigger logic before initiating the appropriate automation tasks.
Beyond these features, CloudWatch provides dashboards for visualizing key metrics, while also allowing users to create custom dashboards and metrics.
License: AWS proprietary
Website: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch
b. Architecture
Amazon CloudWatch consists of several components identifiable by their functions.
At its core, it collects metrics and logs from various sources at both the infrastructure and application levels. These data points are then stored and processed in the backend. CloudWatch offers APIs and SDKs for data ingestion and retrieval, allowing users to interact with the service to gain valuable insights and take appropriate actions.
Advantages
As a service provided by AWS, it readily integrates with most other AWS services. However, it can also be integrated into hybrid and multicloud environments, effectively eliminating the need for multiple monitoring tools.
It handles large volumes of data efficiently and plays a crucial role in enhancing system reliability. Its metrics offer clear insights into KPIs such as API usage, service quotas, performance optimization opportunities, and cost management via an API/SDK, which can easily be integrated with other automation tools.
New Relic’s main function is to monitor application performance and provide actionable insights by minimizing the noise caused by flapping events. It helps organizations troubleshoot and optimize their entire tech stack.
It also provides integration capabilities with all the key automation tools widely used by organizations today. It enables developers, operational teams, and business leaders to gain a holistic view of their digital systems, helping them define data-driven decisions and triggers.
a. Features
As mentioned earlier, application performance monitoring offers detailed visibility into application code, database queries, and third-party API calls. New Relic also tracks the health and performance of infrastructure components, including containers and other cloud services.
It excels at monitoring user interactions and provides actionable insights for improvement. Additionally, it features an alerting system and exposes APIs to integrate with other tools in the ecosystem, enabling automation.
Pricing: Based on the number of users and the volume of data
Website: https://newrelic.com/
b. Architecture
At a high level, New Relic’s architecture is similar to other generic monitoring and observability solutions, so there are no complex concepts to learn.
However, what sets it apart is the New Relic Database (NRDB), a specialized database optimized for processing large volumes of telemetry data within the New Relic One platform. Data is collected using lightweight agent software, and the processed information is displayed through a customizable user interface.
The platform also supports integration via API and CLI, making it highly useful for automation in DevOps, infrastructure management, and container orchestration.
Advantages
New Relic is sufficient for meeting end-to-end monitoring needs, eliminating the need for multiple tools. It excels at simplifying observability, thereby reducing operational overhead. With its GraphQL API and CLI, developers can automate tasks, manage resources, and integrate crucial information into automation scripts.
This DevOps monitoring tool also enables tracing within Kubernetes deployments, facilitating efficient rollouts through various deployment strategies.
Here are some other options for cloud management tools:
- AppDynamics: AppDynamics is a notable application performance monitoring tool that can provide insights into automation processes like CI/CD or DevOps workflows via APIs. It also enables automated performance testing and provides feedback on the impact of code changes on the application performance.
- Dynatrace: Dynatrace is another tool that identifies itself as an AI-powered observability platform. It automatically discovers applications, services, and infrastructure components and sets up the monitoring required for dynamic cloud environments.
Security and regulatory compliance are critical areas that demand expertise and close attention. For high-revenue businesses, weak security practices make security breaches a constant threat.
With data protection regulations becoming stricter, it is more important than ever for organizations to handle data securely and confidentially. Fortunately, many tools now offer automated solutions that efficiently monitor and address security issues. In this section, we’ll explore a few of these tools.
Prisma Cloud is a cloud-native security platform built to protect applications, data, and infrastructure across multicloud and hybrid environments. It provides comprehensive visibility, security, and compliance management for cloud deployments.
The platform helps teams secure entire infrastructure stacks, containerized deployments, serverless functions, and APIs throughout their lifecycle.
a. Features
Continuous visibility of cloud assets is the core feature of Prisma Cloud. This up-to-date view of the infrastructure components enables advanced threat detection and response capabilities and also leverages machine learning to identify and prioritize threats.
Compliance management features enable teams to assess the posture of their environments against the industry standard and custom policies.
As far as automation is concerned, Prisma Cloud offers automated risk prioritization, vulnerability patching, runtime protection, infrastructure security, and compliance management.
Pricing: Enterprise Edition and Compute Edition
Website: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/prisma/cloud
b. Architecture
Prisma Cloud’s key components have clearly defined responsibilities:
- The Prisma Cloud Compute provides runtime protection for compute services like virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions.
- The Prisma Cloud Defenders are lightweight agents deployed on selected targets to collect telemetry and also enforce policies.
- The Prisma Cloud Console is the central management interface where policies can be configured, alerts can be viewed, and to generate reports.
Prisma Cloud also integrates with CI/CD tools and other third-party event management systems to extend its utility.
Advantages
Prisma Cloud helps maintain security in multicloud environments by automatically securing cloud-native infrastructure. With features like auto-remediation and policy-as-code enforcement, teams can scale their workloads securely and efficiently.
Its continuous security monitoring and real-time alerting ensure a strong security posture, even in dynamic cloud environments.
In CI/CD pipelines, Prisma Cloud detects and blocks untrusted images before deployment, automating security checks throughout the development process. It also protects applications from zero-day threats at runtime and performs ongoing automated compliance checks.
Orca Security’s key differentiator is its agentless approach, providing comprehensive visibility and protection across multicloud environments. It offers continuous monitoring and cloud infrastructure security solutions with minimal manual intervention, helping to discover and assess all cloud assets while maintaining a holistic security posture.
a. Features
Implementing Orca Security can significantly enhance automation efforts. Its SideScanning technology enables agentless, read-only scanning of cloud environments, eliminating the need for agent deployment.
Orca provides automated, context-aware risk prioritization, ranking vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance issues. Additionally, it updates the security posture in real time, allowing for swift responses to new threats and violations.
Pricing: Enterprise Edition and Compute Edition
Website: https://orca.security
b. Architecture
At its core, the Orca Cloud Security Platform integrates with cloud provider APIs to scan and gather data about various components in the environment. Its SideScanning engine analyzes this data to create an asset inventory and detect security issues.
The context engine correlates findings across different layers of the cloud stack to provide a unified view of risk. The Orca security platform also integrates with other security and DevOps tools to introduce automation in those workflows.
Advantages
Compared to other tools in the security automation space, the agentless approach greatly simplifies the asset discovery process, reducing operational overhead. This makes scaling effortless, as Orca Security automatically detects and assesses newly created assets for potential vulnerabilities. Additionally, Orca Security’s integration capabilities enable teams to seamlessly incorporate insights into their existing automation workflows.
Commvault is a comprehensive data management and protection solution that helps with automated backups, recovery, and various tasks required for data lifecycle management across multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.
It is a great solution for streamlining data management processes, reducing manual intervention, and ensuring consistent data protection for data at rest and in transit.
a. Features
The intelligent data management features automatically classify, index, and organize data based on predefined policies, regardless of the format. These policies also facilitate efficient governance and ensure data compliance. Automated backup and recovery processes provide consistent protection across various sources and locations. Additionally, Commvault offers AI-powered anomaly detection to quickly identify and address compliance issues.
Pricing: Both subscription-based licenses and perpetual licenses
Website: https://www.commvault.com
b. Architecture
At its core, the CommServe server functions as the central management hub, coordinating all data management activities. MediaAgents handle data movement and storage operations, and the Commvault Command Center offers a unified interface for policy management and reporting. The platform’s REST API plays a crucial role in integrating with third-party services and tools.
Advantages
One of Commvault’s key advantages is its policy-driven approach, which enables teams to define and enforce consistent data management practices across the entire IT landscape, eliminating the need for manual intervention. It automatically discovers and protects new data sources, ensuring that all critical information is included in backup and recovery processes. Additionally, its integration with cloud providers supports automated data tiering and lifecycle management.
Other notable tools for security and compliance automation include AWS Config, Azure Security Center, and Aqua Security.
- AWS Config and Azure Security Center: AWS Config and Azure Security Center are cloud platform-native services offered by AWS and MS Azure, respectively. They help continuously assess security posture and are integrated with multiple automation solutions to address vulnerabilities.
- Aqua Security: Aqua Security specializes in container security, although it can be integrated with multiple CI/CD tools for quick feedback.
In this post, we’ve explored various cloud automation tools across different categories related to cloud infrastructure management. The options mentioned are just starting points, and we encourage you to explore them further before choosing the right solution for your needs.
Don’t forget to check out Spacelift, which can be used to orchestrate your operations across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and your private clouds. The platform lets you achieve sophisticated infrastructure automation with drift detection and powerful visibility. You can apply infrastructure changes straight from your pull requests, allowing secure self-service access to be granted to developers.
If you want to learn more about Spacelift, create a free account, or book a demo with one of our engineers.
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Spacelift is a flexible orchestration solution for IaC development. It delivers enhanced collaboration, automation, and controls to simplify and accelerate the provisioning of cloud-based infrastructures.
