Top 10 Cloud Automation Solutions

‍Businesses are increasingly turning toward cloud automation solutions to streamline operations, boost productivity, and optimize resource utilization. These tools empower them to automate several tasks across their cloud infrastructure, from provisioning and configuration management to deployment and orchestration.

In this article, we unveil the top 10 cloud automation solutions to help you streamline how businesses harness the power of the cloud. Whether you're seeking to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, or improve scalability, these innovative platforms offer unparalleled capabilities to drive your business forward.

What are Cloud Automation Solutions?

Cloud automation solutions serve as instrumental tools for teams to streamline and expedite various tasks and processes within their IT infrastructure. These solutions deliver scalable, reliable, and secure automation capabilities. By automating routine tasks such as provisioning servers, managing software updates, and monitoring system performance, one can free up valuable time and resources to look after more strategic initiatives. 

Cloud automation solutions typically involve using tools such as configuration management, workflow automation, and orchestration. These tools help organizations define, enforce, and monitor desired states across their IT infrastructure, making it easier to maintain consistency and reliability. By automating routine tasks, organizations can achieve greater operational efficiency, reduce downtime, and more effectively respond to changing business needs.

Benefits of Cloud Automation

Here are some of the major benefits you can get with cloud automation solutions:

• Increased Efficiency: Cloud automation solutions streamline operations by minimizing human error, enhancing accuracy, and expediting time to market for new products and services by automating repetitive tasks.
• Save on Costs: By reducing manual intervention and optimizing resource allocation, automation helps lower operational costs, making processes more efficient and economical.
• Enhanced Security: Implementing cloud automation best practices fortifies the security posture, mitigates risks, and ensures regulatory compliance, thereby safeguarding sensitive data and systems.
• Improved Collaboration: Automation fosters better collaboration among development, operations, and security teams, facilitating quicker decision-making and more effective problem-solving.
• Improved Capacity to Scale: Cloud automation solutions enable rapid scaling of operations in response to demand fluctuations, ensuring optimal performance and resource utilization, thereby enhancing agility and responsiveness.

Cloud Automation Use Cases

Cloud automation can apply to a wide variety of workflows for businesses looking to enhance their operational efficiency and drive growth, including: 

• Managing Workloads: Cloud automation solutions enable the configuration of monitoring tools to oversee workload performance. These tools can respond to alerts and execute load balancing to optimize resources and enhance performance. 
• Autoscaling storage: Utilizing an auto-scaler for cloud storage allows for the automatic scaling of resources in accordance with workload demands. It helps reduce dependencies on multiple tools like deployment, monitoring and alerting, as it is taken care by Lucidity. Thereby it helps reduce inflated costs as well as reduce DevOps efforts required in managing storage resources. 
• Provisioning Infrastructure with Automated Tools: Deploying cloud automation tools for infrastructure provisioning saves time, especially when configuring multiple virtual servers. Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) cloud automation tools generate templates specifying and applying server configurations, extending to additional resources like networking and storage capabilities. IaC technologies are well-suited for cloud environments due to the availability of vendor-specific solutions from cloud service providers.
• Data Backup: Manual backups are time-consuming and susceptible to errors and delays during urgent situations. Automated backups eliminate the IT team's need for manual intervention and decision-making. Planned automation of data backup processes reduces data loss and minimizes costly failures.
• Version Control and Visibility: Regular implementation of cloud automation creates an audit trail showcasing active cloud resources and modifications made. This enhances version control and provides visibility into resource usage, facilitating efficient management and accountability.

Top Cloud Automation Solutions

We have curated a list of the top 10 cloud automation solutions based on the aspects mentioned above.

1. Lucidity

In today’s swiftly evolving technological landscape, the adoption of cloud computing has emerged as a cornerstone for enterprises striving to streamline operations and effectively manage data. However, maintaining optimal storage levels within cloud infrastructures is paramount to mitigate downtime and curtail unnecessary expenditures. While many organizations provision a predetermined block storage level, the presence of unused areas can precipitate inefficiencies and potentially disrupt operations during storage expansion. This is where Lucidity steps in to offer its expertise and support.

As a trusted partner, Lucidity specializes in optimizing cloud storage utilization, ensuring that your resources are utilized to their fullest potential while minimizing wastage. Our tailored solutions are designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure, leveraging advanced automation and analytics to dynamically adjust storage allocations based on real-time demands. Lucidity assures that your cloud storage infrastructure remains agile, efficient, and cost-effective

It assists you in optimizing storage costs through automation and prevents any possibility of downtime or disruption. It overcomes the most challenging situations faced by organizations operating in cloud services:

• Manual Storage Management: Managing storage manually can be quite challenging and also opens the doors for errors. Reducing storage size manually involves various tasks, like data backup, creating a smaller volume, removing or modifying the original volume, and many other tedious and time-consuming tasks. 
• Downtime: Traditional management and storage optimization require manual intervention, which can result in downtime. Also, enterprises often forget to monitor agents or set alerts regularly, which can cause further delays and lead to downtime. 
• Hyperbolized Storage: Most enterprises overestimate disk growth instead of adjusting their resources per the changing requirements. Consequently, this leads to unnecessary expenses for unutilized or underutilized resources. 

Now, the question is, what does Lucidity do to tackle such challenges?

Lucidity has revolutionized cloud infrastructure management with its innovative block storage auto-scaler, a cutting-edge cloud orchestration solution designed to tackle the most pressing challenges faced by enterprises. One standout feature of this solution is its automatic cloud block storage provisioning, which includes live shrinkage and expansion capabilities. By dynamically adjusting storage resources in response to changing workload demands, organizations can optimize consumption, reduce operational disturbances, and maximize cost savings.

Lucidity is used by numerous large-scale enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies like SpartanNash, benefiting from its solutions. By automating storage provisioning procedures and ensuring continuous operations, Lucidity empowers organizations to streamline their cloud infrastructure management and achieve greater efficiency.

Lucidity's objectives is to automate cloud block storage provisioning, thereby maximizing cost savings, reducing downtime, and alleviating the workload on DevOps teams through block storage optimization. To accomplish this goal, Lucidity offers two key solutions:

• Block Storage Auto-Scaler: Lucidity's auto-scaler automates real-time expansion or shrinkage of storage capabilities, simplifying storage management and addressing the pervasive issue of overprovisioning. By dynamically adjusting storage resources based on server requirements, this solution optimizes resource utilization and accelerates the provisioning process, ultimately reducing costs and improving efficiency.

• Storage Audit: Lucidity's Storage Audit is a free to use tool that enables organizations to uncover inefficiencies and underutilized aspects of their cloud infrastructure, providing valuable insights into storage consumption patterns. By conducting thorough storage utilization audits, this solution helps mitigate risks associated with rising storage costs and relieves DevOps teams from the burden of manual examination. By automatically optimizing storage, Lucidity empowers organizations to make informed decisions and maximize the value of their cloud investments.

How does Lucidity work?

Firstly, a storage audit is done to conduct a detailed storage analysis and evaluation to determine the reason for inefficiencies. After completing the audit process, audit reports are generated, highlighting the areas for optimizing resources, hence saving on cloud costs. 

As the route of manual discoveries and monitoring is tedious and time-consuming and demands resources from DevOps teams, we at Lucidity automate it for you. 

Lucidity’s storage audit and auto-scaler automate the process with a user-friendly and easily deployable tool to address this challenge. With this tool, you can optimize costs and prevent downtime as it provides deep insights into disk health and utilization. 

Integrating your cloud infrastructure with Lucidity is simple and quick after the audit process; it usually takes no more than 15 minutes to finish.

Read on to find out what happens when you use Lucidity!

On EC2 instances, Lucidity is deployed based on the fetched audit report. Itcarry out two important duties:

• Collect storage metrics, including volume, burst, queue, latency, IOPS, etc., and provide them to the auto-scaler.
• This auto-scaler's algorithm is designed to automatically instruct the agents to expand or shrink based on the available resources. 

When idle or overprovisioned resources are identified, Lucidity's Block Storage Auto-Scaler takes over. You can get several advantages, such as:

• Lucidity's Block Storage auto-scaler can save up to 70% on idle resource costs by automating the modification or adjustment of storage resources. By dynamically scaling storage capacity based on real-time demand, you can optimize resource allocation and minimize wasteful spending, which can eventually result in significant cost reductions.
• Manual provisioning procedures frequently result in downtime. On the other hand, resource adjustments are made in a matter of minutes using Lucidity's Block Storage Auto-Scaler, preventing downtime and guaranteeing continuous performance. With this smooth scalability, you can preserve operational continuity and provide users with consistent service levels.
• With the use of Lucidity's "Create Policy" tool, you can optimize uptime reliability by customizing factors like disk utilization and buffer capacity for automated scaling. You can maximize the efficiency of the storage infrastructure and optimize resource usage by tailoring policies to specific business requirements and performance targets.

Besides this, Lucidity has an easy-to-use interface that is straightforward and approachable. The all-access dashboard provides comprehensive insights into various indicators, such as cost savings, average disk utilization before and after Lucidity adoption, disk coverage, and the number of site reliability engineer (SRE) calls avoided. Because of this visibility, you can efficiently monitor performance and make well-informed decisions.

You can also use our ROI calculator to see how much you can save through Lucidity’s auto-scaler. Just enter some basic details, like growth rate and disk spend, and you are ready to visualize your cost savings.

Interested to explore? 

Book a demo with Lucidity to discover how automation can lower your overall effort and storage expenses.

2. AWS CloudFormation 

AWS CloudFormation is a powerful IaC (infrastructure as code) tool that helps you enable provisioning and resource management through templates. This allows you to deploy infrastructure consistently and repeatedly.

The best part is that it lets you create a template to explain Amazon Web Services infrastructure and migrate the services into the Amazon cloud. You don’t have to set the configuration manually for each resource. This cloud automation tool handles all dependent activities for related deployment in cloud migration. Configuring and controlling deployment with CloudFormation is very easy. 

• Easy-to-scale production stacks: With CloudFormation, you can execute anything, from a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance to a complicated multi-region application. 
• Use DevOps to manage infrastructure: You can use CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) automation to automate, roll-out, and test infrastructure templates. 
• Defining subnets: You can easily define a subnet for the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or provision services like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) or AWS OpsWorks.

3. Kubernetes

Also known as K8, Kubernetes is an open-source solution for automating containerized applications' scaling, deployment, and management. It is compatible with all cloud platforms and any environment. You can simultaneously run services and applications in multiple clusters on one cloud platform. Kubernetes acts as a conductor, telling containers to act together and directing different sections of an orchestra. 

• Storage Orchestration: You can mount any storage system automatically, be it from network storage via NFS or iSCSI, local storage, or a public cloud provider.
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks: Kubernetes monitors your application's health to ensure it doesn't kill all of your instances at once. It gradually applies changes to your application or its configuration. In case of an issue, Kubernetes will reverse the modification on your behalf.

4. Azure Automation

Another cloud-based automation solution offered by Microsoft is Azure Automation. It offers a huge range of automation capabilities, such as configuration management and runbooks for task automation. It also offers services like auto-scaling, restarting services, file configuration, and integration of management systems using serverless runbooks. 

• Gather inventory and monitor changes: It helps you easily inventory installed applications and other configuration items. With its rich reporting and searching capabilities, you can find and track changes across services, files, the software registry, etc. 
• Integration with your services: You can orchestrate across on-premises with the help of a hybrid runbook worker to provide on-demand services. 
• Save resources: It automates all the time-consuming and error-prone cloud management tasks. By removing errors and enhancing efficiency, it helps lower the cost of operations. 

5. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Ansible is one of the cloud automation solutions for effectively managing and automating services across different stages, like development, testing, deployment, etc. You can seamlessly integrate it with various DevOps tools to smooth the workflow. 

Ansible was created for Microsoft Azure and customized for the IT crowd. Its primary selling feature is removing the repetitive tasks that DevOps teams often find troublesome. This cloud automation solution can be used to deploy software, establish continuous delivery, and configure file management. 

• End-to-end automation: It connects endpoints without agents, eradicating the communication processes and smoothly out the workflow with proper security. It also supports performance testing and bug fixing.
• Advanced automation with YAML: Ansible automates the steps using a data serialization language. It also offers YAML-based playbooks to manage task automation. 
• Ansible Galaxy: It provides a Source, or repository, from which an Ansible playbook can copy instructions.

6. ProsperOps

Another autonomous cloud automation solution is ProsperOps, which helps organizations manage risk and save money. It can lower risk by shrinking terms and coordinating commitment timelines.

ProsperOps uses real-time telemetry from the user's cloud environment to optimize discount instrument coverage and utilization algorithmically. This enhances savings, reduces commitment risk, and removes manual cloud financial management work. 

• Data-driven insights: ProsperOps provides clear data-based insights into your cloud consumption. It leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to evaluate data, forecast expenses, and identify potential saving areas. 
• Seamless integration with accounting: Your finance and accounting teams can close the books without communicating with engineers again, as it can allocate intelligent AWS Savings based on how your business runs. It also provides a very intuitive dashboard with all the important FinOps insights. 
• Set the parameters: With ProsperOps, you can set the coverage and risk parameters to take important actions using the best financial tools available. This simplifies the cost optimization process. 

7. Cast AI

Cast AI is one of the leading Kubernetes automation platforms. It helps reduce cloud costs by 50% over Azure, AWS, and GCP. It integrates AI-driven security, cloud cost monitoring, and management insights for Kubernetes. 

By avoiding downtime, the platform promises to provide business continuity, double the power of DevOps, and lower the user's cloud payment in half.

Moreover, Cast AI provides full support while migrating from on-premises infrastructure or managing a hybrid cloud environment. 

• Quick with installation: Its installation process is simple and quick. You can get Kubernetes nodes efficiently managed by Cast AI in just 20 minutes. This means you can save more time and effort for IT teams.
• Robust tracking features: With its strong tracking features, you can keep a keen eye on the budget to manage and optimize costs effectively. You can make informed financial decisions to ensure your cloud resources are cost-optimized.
• Workload right-sizing: It allows you to easily adapt to your workload's demands and limitations automatically to meet the evolving requirements and reach the ideal cost-performance ratio.

8. Puppet

Another notable tool for infrastructure automation is Puppet, which is tailored for DevOps, especially for server configuration management. You can define and enforce the required system state to simplify infrastructure management and deployment. It mainly administers the automation tools. It helps to manage complex workflows with reusable blocks of self-healing infrastructure as code. 

• Quick infrastructure deployment: It delivers better results with quick infrastructure deployment per your changing business requirements, using model-driven and task-based configuration management. 
• Operational efficiency: Puppet, the automated solution for cloud data platforms, detects vulnerabilities at scale and fixes them according to predetermined actions. Additionally, Puppet provides a range of add-ons to help achieve operational efficiency and compliance goals. 
• More for DevOps teams: DevOps experts can automate processes down to the particular pain point, freeing up more time for them to concentrate on large-scale development. 

9. SaltStack

SaltStack emerges as another indispensable cloud automation solution. It is a Python-based open-source configuration management and automation tool for managing applications, servers, and databases. Its primary function is to carry out commands on remote systems; it can quickly and efficiently execute several commands on thousands of systems. In essence, Salt enables developers to set up several systems at once.

• Remote execution framework: SaltStack assists you in a remote execution framework for configuration management, provisioning, automation, and orchestration. 
• State system: Its configuration management is based on storing all ‘state’ or configuration data in an easy-to-understand data structure. The concept behind this state system is simple, extensible, deterministic, and layer-able. 
• Quick communications: Its high-speed communication approach makes it a powerful multitasking solution to many specific problems in an infrastructure. 

10. Terraform

Terraform stands out as a compelling option for the IaC (infrastructure as code) cloud automation solution. It is designed to automate and manage infrastructure deployment in various environments. It is an important tool in modern DevOps processes due to its infrastructure management capabilities.

It allows the modification of low-level elements such as networking, storage, and computing services. Additionally, it effectively and securely maintains high-level components like domain name entries and software-as-a-service features.

• Multi-cloud provisioning: It deploys server-less functions with AWS Lambda, provisions a load-balancer in Google Cloud, and manages Azure Active Directory resources. 
• Manage network infrastructure: It assists in updating important networking tasks, such as updating load balancer target pools or applying the latest firewall policies.
• Integrates with existing workflows: It automates infrastructure deployment through already present CI/CD workflows. 

Take Charge of Your Cloud Automation Today!

By now, you would have realized that Cloud automation solutions offer many opportunities for organizations seeking to optimize their IT operations and maximize efficiency. From streamlining deployment processes to automating resource management and ensuring seamless workflow orchestration, the top 10 cloud automation solutions highlighted in this guide provide robust and versatile tools for addressing a wide range of business needs.

By embracing these innovative solutions, organizations can unlock new levels of agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness in managing their cloud infrastructure. Whether it's reducing manual intervention, improving deployment times, or enhancing overall operational efficiency, these solutions offer the potential to transform the way businesses leverage cloud technology.

As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation and adopt cloud-first strategies, investing in cloud automation solutions will be essential for staying ahead of the curve. With the right tools and strategies in place, organizations can harness the full power of the cloud to drive innovation, accelerate growth, and achieve their business objectives in today's dynamic and competitive landscape.

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