16 of the most useful cloud management tools

A growing set of services allow customers to more easily track their cloud usage

One of the biggest concerns users have with public cloud resources is not knowing how much they will cost, given the pay-as-you-go model.

"IT shops are becoming cost centers for service delivery," says William Fellows, a researcher at the 451 Group. "But they're looking for ways to determine how their clouds are running, how much it's costing and whether it's a good value."

CLOUD SHOWDOWN: Amazon vs. Rackspace (OpenStack) vs. Microsoft vs. Google

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Provisioning/automation

Chef: An open source systems integration framework that includes a library of configuration management tools. Developed by venture-backed Opscode, it integrates with existing applications, including various databases and LDAP directories, and allows for the discovering and provisioning of public or private resources. It has "cookbooks" which include "recipes" for launching OpenStack private cloud instances and AWS public cloud resources, for instance, and it also works across VMware and Rackspace environments, among others.

More information: Opscode Chef

MORE OPEN SOURCE: 10 most successful open source tools of 2012

enStratus: Based in Minneapolis, enStratus's technology enables consumption of multiple types of cloud resources from a single platform. Key features include the ability to manage public or private cloud environments, including security controls such as key management, automation of cloud resource provisioning and installing spending caps for specific projects. It's delivered either as an on-premise application or a software-as-a-service hosted platform and works across most of the leading cloud providers including: Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloudscaling OCS, Citrix CloudStack, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos, Eucalyptus, GoGrid, Google Storage, HP Cloud Services, Joyent Cloud, Nimbula, OpenStack, OpSource, Rackspace, ServerExpress, Tata InstaCompute, Terremark, VMware and Windows Azure.

More information: enStratus

Puppet Labs: Puppet Labs' software is meant to help users automate repetitive tasks, such as deploying applications and managing infrastructure. Within the Puppet Enterprise software, users can discover resources, provision them, configure and manage operating systems and applications, and update patches across public or private clouds. A trial version of the software allows users to manage up to 10 nodes for free.

More information: Puppet Labs

RightScale: Founded in 2006, RightScale is a platform for managing and deploying cloud resources across public and private environments, providing users tools to configure, monitor, automate deployments, and govern controls and access. It works across a variety of public and private platforms including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Software, Microsoft Azure, Datepipe and private cloud platforms including CloudStack, Eucalyptus and OpenStack.

More information: RightScale

GigaSpaces Technologies: GigaSpaces is a platform for automating application deployment to a variety of environments, including public and private clouds, as well as physical hardware. The company's newest product is Cloudify, which it markets as a private platform as a service (PaaS) for deploying applications to public cloud environments without requiring changes to the code. It uses a relationship the company just inked with Chef to automate these tasks.

More information: GigaSpaces

Cloud management 

BMC: Fresh off news of a partnership with Amazon Web Services that certifies BMC as a manager of AWS cloud resources, BMC seems armed with ammunition to take to the enterprise market by being able to enable management of various private cloud platforms and AWS's public cloud.