Adopting the cloud  must come with a management solution strategy. Cloud Management refers to all cloud environment aspects and their related tasks. Tasks include deploying, monitoring, analyzing and more.

Many IT organizations today running to adopt the new disruptive cloud methodologies. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic decision, picking the right way to orchestrate your cloud resources should be an integral part of your cloud adoption strategy.

Cloud aspects include capacity, utilization, availability, security and more. The following vendors are Amazon partners that can help the enterprise move safely to the cloud. The enterprise will need to arm its back office for its administrator with tools to maintain the new cloud virtual resources.

pic credit: http://www.carecloud.com/advantages/ease-of-use-software-built-for-you/

In my research for tools to easily deploy applications over the Amazon AWS cloud. I found tens of tools that support deployment, monitoring and maintaining the cloud environment. The following tools are the five best I found:

1. RightScale –  Maybe the most experienced vendor to manage AWS, RightScale Cloud Management provide capabilities for designing, deploying, and managing applications across multiple public or private clouds. RightScale has a strong relationship with Amazon AWS. Upon all of those the ISV (independent software vendor) need to engage with their development team and a professional services effort will be included.
2. Cohesiveft – The application provides an option to build custom application stacks for virtualized infrastructure; stacks that are loosely coupled, vertically aware, and multi-sourced. I am not entirely sure about this one; it seems to provide a complex deployment tool.
3. Scalr – Scalr monitors all your servers for crashes, and replaces any that fail. To ensure you never lose any data, Scalr backs up your data at regular intervals and uses Amazon EBS for database storage. Sclar includes simple capabilities and a good UI for fast application deployment.
4. Scalarium – This application supports LAMP applications.  From the demo it looks nice and simple. I am not sure about auto-scaling, though they do claim to support it.
5. Enstratus – This seems to be the most useful “sign-up & play cloud tool”.  It aims to put you in full control of your cloud platforms, including monitoring, auto-scaling, auto recovery, auto backup and SSL certificate maintenance. The system UI is friendly compared to the other systems mentioned in this article. I suggest trying out their free trial.

This market is still very young and there is not yet sufficient support for the cloud consumer, with basic capabilities that will facilitate fast and cost-effective deployment.

This post was originally posted on IAmOnDemand.com

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About the Author

Ofir Nachmani is Chief Evangelist and Community Leader at Newvem. On his previous adventure, he led ClickSoftware’s Cloud adoption initiative. He also held several positions at Zarathustra SaaS development including ContractorOffice.com product manager and company CEO. In 2009, ClickSoftware acquired the AST group and Zarathustra as part of it. Check out his personal cloud computing blog at http://www.iamondemand.com

Keywords: Amazon AWS elastic cloud services, Amazon Web Services, Deployment tools, Integration Cloud Management, Amazon EBS, ec2 Instances Provisioning, IaaS, Cloud Services, Amazon Cloud Adoption, cloud Integration, Cloud Management, Cloud Resources Orchestration, RightScale, Sclar, cloud utilization, cloud availability, LAMP Applications