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

After migrating to the cloud, depending on the Cloud Provider and the services you have signed up for, applications can become extremely tricky to manage. To make the lives of the developer easier, there are a bunch of tools that help you manage your Application on the Cloud.

Container Management Solution (Kubernetes / Docker)

A Container Management system essentially automates the process of containerizing your Cloud Hardware. A container is a component of an application that contains the source code for the application, along with all the required libraries and dependencies required for the app to function.

This category has 2 clear−cut favorites− Docker and Kubernetes. Both provide a lot of the same functionality. The key difference in selecting one would be that although Docker provides better services in many aspects, it is also a bit trickier to use, while Kubernetes is a bit easier.

Content Management Systems

A Content Management System (CMS) is an extremely handy tool if the concern is to build an app that has content that changes often. A CMS allows for quickly performing CRUD operations on a Database with low to no code. CMS offers an easy−to−use API for the developer to fetch the content easily. The CMS may be headless or come with a pre−built front.

The major CMS for Cloud are− Cloud CMS, Magnolia CMS, Contentstack, Butter CMS, CosmicJS, DotCMS

Cloud Health Monitoring Systems

Data Security is one of the most major concerns that developers face. It is one thing to store and retrieve the data; it is another thing to securely store and securely retrieve the data. It is extremely important to write secure code, and a Cloud Monitoring System helps you with that.

Cloud monitoring is the process in which a tool studies the entire IT industry, analyses the flaws that were made, and then reciprocates it to create alerts when a particular section behaves in an unusual or unsafe way.

The major Cloud Health Monitoring Systems are DataDog, AppDynamics, New Relic, Dynatrace, and Zabbix.

DDoS protection

A Distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) is one of the most common attacks websites face on a daily basis. It works by overwhelming the requests flow with automated requests from distributed devices, rendering the target system oversaturated. It is extremely difficult to implement DDoS protection software on your own since the source devices are distributed; hence, some 3rd party DDoS protection is necessary.

Top DDoS protection Services− Cloudflare, Akamai Kona, G−core labs Global DDoS protection, AppTrana, Link11, Sucuri.

Firewall

Apart from DDoS, a cloud system faces millions of other daily threats. A good Firewall can easily make most, if not all, of these threats obsolete. Again, implementing a secure firewall alone can be extremely challenging; hence, using a Firewall as a Service (FwaaS) is also recommended.

Top FwaaS providers− Cloudflare Magic Firewall, Perimeter 81, Sophos, Palo Alto Networks SASE, CrowdStrike.

Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment Tools

If you are using cloud services on a project that is incomplete, which will receive some updates, you can either manually integrate new code and restart the deployment each time, or you can use a CI/CD tool to help automate this process. A CI/CD tool will automatically integrate the code, merge the code, run tests, and then deploy the code.

Top CI/CD tools − Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub.

Conclusion

There are lot of tools available on the web that make the development of an app hosted in the cloud easier, but all these do add complexity to our infrastructure. A better option would be to opt for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service, like AWS, Firebase, IBM Cloud, etc., that will magically take care of all of this and more while seamlessly integrating with our code in the Cloud.