Here’s an overview of the top open source tools organisations can choose from to manage their cloud infrastructure.
Open source tools have become a popular choice for managing cloud environments due to their cloud-agnostic nature, customisation, cost-effectiveness, and community support. Here are some of the top open source tools that can help organisations manage their cloud infrastructure with ease and efficiency.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes, often abbreviated as K8s, is an open source container orchestration platform initially developed by Google. It has become the de-facto standard for container management, enabling organisations to automate the deployment, scaling, and operation of containerised applications. Kubernetes simplifies the management of complex applications by grouping containers into logical units, making it easier to manage and scale them across a cluster of machines. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) are examples of localised adoption of Kubernetes by hyperscalers. Its key features are:
Automated rollouts and rollbacks
Kubernetes can automatically deploy and roll back updates to applications without downtime.
Self-healing
It can automatically restart failed containers, replace them, and reschedule them when nodes die.
Horizontal scaling
Kubernetes provides easy horizontal scaling (horizontal autoscaling) of applications through simple commands or autoscaling based on resource usage.
Service discovery and load balancing
It offers built-in service discovery and load balancing, ensuring that microservices can easily find and communicate with each other.
Consider an e-commerce application experiencing fluctuating traffic during the sale period. Kubernetes can help manage the load by automatically scaling the number of running containers during peak shopping times, ensuring a seamless user experience without manual intervention.
Terraform
Developed by HashiCorp, Terraform is an open source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows users to define and provision data centre infrastructure using a high-level configuration language. Terraform enables organisations to manage their infrastructure in a version-controlled manner, making it easy to replicate, modify, and scale environments. It helps to develop cloud-agnostic IaC services for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure management. Here are some of its key features.
Declarative configuration
Users can describe the desired state of their infrastructure and Terraform will create, update, or delete resources to match the configuration.
Provider support
Terraform supports a wide range of cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and many others.
State management
It keeps track of the state of the infrastructure, enabling it to determine the necessary changes to reach the desired state.
Execution plans
Before making any changes, Terraform generates an execution plan that shows what actions will be taken. This allows users to review and approve changes.
Let’s take an example. A company wants to set up identical development, staging, and production environments. Using Terraform, they can define the infrastructure as code and apply the same configuration across all environments, ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of errors while saving time in spinning up services across environments quickly.
Ansible
Ansible is an open source IT automation tool developed by Red Hat. It is used for configuration management, application deployment, task automation, and orchestration. Ansible simplifies complex IT workflows by automating repetitive tasks and ensuring consistency across systems.
Agentless architecture
Ansible does not require any agent installation on managed nodes. It uses SSH (Linux) or WinRM (Windows), making it lightweight and easy to manage.
Simple YAML-based configuration
It uses YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) for writing playbooks, making it human-readable and easy to understand, even for non-programmers.
Idempotency
Ensures that tasks are executed only when necessary. If a task has already been performed, it will skip it, ensuring there are no unintended changes.
Extensibility
Supports a wide range of modules for managing systems, applications, cloud platforms, and network devices. Custom modules can also be created to meet specific requirements.
Cross-platform support
Ansible can manage various operating systems, including Linux, Windows, macOS, and network devices like routers and switches.
Ansible enables organisations to automate cloud infrastructure management across platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It simplifies tasks such as provisioning virtual machines, configuring networks, deploying applications, and scaling resources. For example, Ansible can create EC2 instances on AWS, configure security groups, and deploy applications seamlessly using playbooks. Its agentless architecture ensures easy integration with cloud APIs, allowing organisations to manage multi-cloud environments efficiently, reduce manual errors, and maintain infrastructure consistency at scale.
Prometheus
Prometheus is an open source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed specifically for cloud-native environments. Developed by SoundCloud, Prometheus has become a popular choice for monitoring containerised applications and microservices. It provides powerful querying capabilities and integrates seamlessly with other tools in the cloud-native ecosystem. Native Prometheus monitoring services are available in Azure, AWS and GCP. Its key features are listed below.
Multi-dimensional data model
Prometheus stores time series data with labels, enabling rich queries and precise monitoring.
Powerful query language
Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) allows users to perform complex queries and generate insightful metrics.
Alerting
Includes an alert manager that can trigger notifications based on defined thresholds and conditions.
Service discovery
It supports dynamic service discovery, making it easy to monitor changing cloud environments.
A company running a microservices architecture can leverage Prometheus to monitor resource usage and performance metrics of each microservice. By setting up alerts for specific thresholds, the team can quickly respond to any issues, ensuring optimal performance and reliability.
OpenStack
OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform that enables organisations to build and manage private and public clouds. It provides infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) by managing compute, storage, and networking resources through APIs or a dashboard. Its key features are:
Modular architecture
OpenStack consists of independent modules that work together or individually.
Scalability
It can scale horizontally, allowing organisations to add resources as needed to meet growing demands.
Multi-tenancy
Supports multiple users and projects with resource isolation, ensuring secure and efficient cloud operations.
Hybrid cloud support
Integrates easily with public clouds to enable hybrid cloud setups.
OpenStack enables organisations to create private clouds for managing virtual machines, storage, and networking resources. For example, a company can use OpenStack’s Nova module to provision and manage compute instances, Cinder for block storage, and Neutron for network management. It’s ideal for hosting internal applications, running DevOps pipelines, or building hybrid cloud environments by integrating with public clouds like AWS. OpenStack allows businesses to optimise resource utilisation, ensure data security, and maintain cost-effective infrastructure for dynamic workloads.
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open source automation server that is widely used for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). It enables organisations to automate the building, testing, and deployment of applications, reducing manual intervention and increasing the speed of development cycles. Jenkins can be configured to run regression test cases (to validate the build), static code analysis (for quality delivery) and vulnerability/security analysis to make it a 360O build and deployment framework. Here are a few of its key features.
Extensible plugins
Jenkins offers a vast library of plugins that can be used to extend its functionality and integrate with various tools and services.
Pipeline as code
Allows users to define their CI/CD pipelines using code, making them version-controlled and reproducible.
Distributed builds
Supports distributed builds, enabling parallel execution of tasks across multiple nodes.
Notification integration
It integrates with various notification services, allowing teams to receive alerts and updates on build statuses.
A software development team can use Jenkins to automate the testing and deployment of their code. Whenever a developer commits changes to the repository, Jenkins can automatically run tests and, if successful, deploy the code to a staging environment, ensuring a seamless and efficient workflow.
Grafana
Grafana is an open source analytics and monitoring platform that provides interactive visualisations and dashboards for various data sources. It is often used in conjunction with Prometheus to create detailed and customisable dashboards for monitoring cloud environments. Usually, Prometheus and Grafana are used together as observability and monitoring tools for cloud native monitoring. Its key features are:
Custom dashboards
Grafana allows users to create custom dashboards with a wide range of visualisations, including graphs, tables, and heatmaps.
Data source integration
It supports integration with various data sources, such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch.
Alerting
Grafana includes alerting capabilities, enabling users to set up alerts based on defined thresholds and conditions.
Team collaboration
Supports team collaboration, allowing multiple users to share and edit dashboards.
In a cloud operations centre, Grafana dashboards can be used to visualise key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics from various data sources. This provides the operations team with real-time insights and alerts, enabling them to quickly identify and address potential issues.
Apache CloudStack
Apache CloudStack is an open source cloud management platform designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines (VMs) as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). It provides features for managing compute, storage, and networking resources in private, public, or hybrid cloud environments. With a user-friendly web interface and API, organisations can efficiently manage their cloud infrastructure. Its key features are listed below.
Multi-hypervisor support
Supports multiple hypervisors like VMware, KVM, XenServer, and Hyper-V for flexibility in deployment.
Scalability
Designed to handle large-scale cloud environments with thousands of virtual machines.
Built-in networking
Offers advanced networking features, including VLANs, load balancing, and firewall management.
Hybrid cloud support
Enables integration with public clouds like AWS for hybrid cloud setups.
Apache CloudStack is used to create and manage private or hybrid cloud environments. For instance, an organisation can use it to provision VMs, configure virtual networks, and allocate storage across multiple data centres. Its multi-hypervisor support allows IT teams to optimise resource utilisation by running different workloads on various hypervisors. Additionally, it enables seamless hybrid cloud integration by connecting private infrastructure with public clouds like AWS. CloudStack simplifies cloud operations, making it ideal for hosting applications, scaling resources, and managing complex IT environments.
In conclusion, managing cloud environments efficiently requires the right set of tools. Open source tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Prometheus, OpenStack, Jenkins, Grafana, and Apache CloudStack offer powerful features and flexibility to help organisations manage their cloud infrastructure effectively. By leveraging these tools, organisations can automate processes, monitor performance, and scale their environments with ease, driving innovation and growth.
