Top 20 Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for the Cloud AWS/Azure/GCP

Top 20 Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for the Cloud AWS/Azure/GCP. Infrastructure as Code (Iac) is the process that automates the managing and provisions the technology through source code .IaC tools is important because it of aiding in automation of the infrastructure deployment process in a repeatable manner. The benefits of IaC is speed and simplicity and the minimization of risk.

 

In recent times, the demand for cloud computing platforms has been increasing due to the need of  advancement of features and tools. When we say cloud, the first thing that comes to mind is top cloud based companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud platforms (GCP). In this post, we will be compare the top 20 infrastructure as code tools along with their features and benefits.

Before comparison of top 20 infrastructures as code tools for the cloud, we will introduce each cloud computing platform.

AWS DevOps

AWS DevOps is a combination of two tools: Development and Operations. AWS is a medium where it helps to promote the development and operational process. The main purpose of using AWS DevOps tools is to  allow a single team to handle the collective software application lifecycle development, testing the software components, product deployments and important operations.

Google Cloud Platform

Google cloud platform is a cloud service offered by Google that runs on the same infrastructure platforms that Google uses internally to perform various operations such as Google search, accessing Gmail accounts, Google business suites, Google drive and Youtube.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is known as “Azure”, a popular cloud computing technology developed by Microsoft Corporation. The main aim of developing the Microsoft Azure tool is to build, manage, test and deploy the applications or services using Microsoft management global data center.

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20 Best Infrastructure as Code Tools

1. Puppet

Puppet is one of the popular tools and is widely used in the market. This tool allows the delivery and release date of the technology that changes frequently and quickly. The puppet tool consists of features like versioning, automated testing and continuous product delivery.

Puppet Features

• Offers real time context reporting.
• Modeling and managing the entire environment.
• Defined and continuity infrastructure.
• Supports desired state detections and bug free errors.
• This tool inspects and reports on libraries running through the infrastructure.
• This eliminates any manual work during the software delivery process.
• This tool helps the software developer to deliver great software products quickly.

Puppet Benefits

• Core projects in the puppet ecosystem.
• Idempotent, model based, and configuration management.
• A simple language to describe the state and an engine for enforcing it.
• Huge library of reusable modules on the puppet forge.

2. Ansible

Next in this comparison of top 20 Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for the Cloud AWS/Azure/GCP is Ansible. Ansible is one of the leading DevOps software tools. This open source IT engine helps automate application deployment, service software orchestration and cloud provisioning. The main purpose of using Ansible DevOps tool is to perform scale automation and speed up productivity.

Ansible Features

• It is very easy to deploy open source applications.
• This tool also helps avoid the complexity of the software development process.
• Ansible eliminates repetitive kinds of tasks.
• It also manages complex software deployments and speeds up the software development process.

Ansible Benefits

• Ansible automates the existing processes manage legacy like DevOps.
• Define the application once re deploy anywhere.
• Model everything deploys continuously.

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3. Docker

Docker is a container orchestration tool used to build, run and ship any applications in the containerized environment. This docker tool also helps in the assembly of the apps quickly from the different components and is best suited for container management.

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Docker Features

• This tool helps to configure the software systems in a more comfortable and faster way.
• Docker tools also increase productivity.
• It also provides the containers that will be used to run the application in an isolated environment.
• Docker tool also routes the incoming request to publish the ports on available nodes to the container.
• This feature also enables the connections even if there is no task running on the container node.
• The Docker DevOps tool allows a developer to save the secrets into the swarms.

Docker Benefits

• Containers are faster to create and start quickly.
• The containers help you make your development process more agile and responsive.
• Dockers applications perform exactly as they did when they were executed.
• Docker containers are totally independent of each other.
• New containers can be quickly created if the application demands them.

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4. Vagrant

Vagrant is an infrastructure tool used to build an entire development environment and consistent workflow to test the infrastructure scripts on virtual machines. VM is like a file that a software uses ( hypervisor) to run an operating system/

Vagrant Features

• Open source virtual machine management tool.
• Vagrant uses virtualization engines like VMWare or Hyper-V and builds builds on top.
• Creates a consistent virtual machine environment and tests the VM workflow scripts.
• Quickly create the standard environment to test the VM environment.
• This tool also helps to monitor the Java Management Extensions.

Vagrant Benefits

• Easily integrates with other automation tools.
• We can use Vagrant to support sharing between the researchers and their audience.
• Set Up Multi VM Networks easily.
• Vagrant resets the development environment very easy.

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5. Chef

A Chef tool is useful for achieving speed, consistency and scalability. This is a cloud based system and open source software technology. The Chef tool is mainly used to automate infrastructure, reduce manual activity and repetitive tasks for software infrastructure management.

Chef Features

• Chef tool maintains high availability.
• It also manages multiple cloud environments such as Linux, Windows and FreeBSD.
• Maintains a blueprint of the entire infrastructure.
• This also uses the ruby programming language to create a domain specification
• The chef tool does not make any assumptions about the current node status. This also uses various mechanisms to know the current status of the machine.

Chef Benefits

• Centralized store of your infrastructure’s configuration.
• Offers hybrid and SaaS solutions for Chef Servers
• The knife is used to upload configuration changes to the chef server.
• A chef workstation is simply a computer with a local chef repository configured.
• Systems managed by the chef are called nodes.
• One of the most flexible solutions for OS and middle management.

6. Jenkins

Another tool of the comparison top 20 Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for the Cloud AWS/Azure/GCP Jenkins. It is a tool developed for monitoring the repeated task execution. Jenkins is a type of software that allows users to perform continuous integration. When the team check-in code to source control repository, Jenkins starts the Continuous Integration by picking up the changed source code and triggers it into building and running unit tests. Jenkins server tools can be installed on a server side central build.

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Jenkins Features

• Jenkins helps to increase scalable automation.
• This can easily configure and set up the system through a web interface.
• This tool can distribute multiple tasks across different machines and increase concurrency.
• Jenkins tool also offers continuous integration and continuous delivery.
• It consists of more than 400 plugins used to virtually build and test any project.
• It just required a little maintenance and consisted of various GUI tools.

Jenkins Benefits

• Easily accessible and simple installation.
• Intuitive browser hosted project management dashboards.
• Extensive integration capabilities and seamless setup.
• Portable to all major platforms.
• Best plugin support and support pipelines.

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7. Git

Git is a DevOps tool used for used for source code management and to track changes in the source code. It is an open source software distributed version system that is freely available for all users. This tool is designed to handle major as well as minor projects with better efficiency and speed. This is developed to coordinate different tasks among programmers. It just required a little maintenance and consistency of various GUI tools.

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Git Features

• This is a free, open source tool.
• It allows multiple distributed developments.
• This tool supports the pull request type.
• It also supports the faster release cycle.
• It is a very scalable tool.
• This is a very secure tool to use.

Git Benefits

• Accessible UI built around git.
• Well known and open source repositories.
• Code browsing
• View the history of changes, commits, and comments.
• Issue tracking and wiki pages.

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8. Saltstack

Saltstack is a lightweight DevOps tool. Salt is a configuration management (CM), that enables system administrators to automate server provisioning and management tasks. This tool also shows various tasks like real time error queries, logs, and workstation activities. Saltstack is also a software defined data center.

Saltstack Features

• It eliminates the messy configuration and data changes.
• This also traces the detail of all web request types.
• This tool also allows us to fix any type of bugs and find errors before production.
• It also offers secured access and configures the cache images.
• It also secures multi tenancy with role based access control management.
• Flexible image management tool with a private registry to manage and store various images.

Saltstack Benefits

• The configuration file can be simple YAML templates or scripts in Python and PyDSL.
• It can communicate with the clients via SSH or locally installed agents.
• The web interface allows you to view running tasks and status of subordinate nodes and execute commands on clients.
• Scales extremely well.

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9. Splunk

Splunk is a tool used to make any machine data usable, valuable, and accessible to everyone. In other words it is a software platform used to monitor, analyze and visualize the machine generated data in real time. It captures, indexes, and correlates the real time data in a searchable container and produces graphs, alerts, dashboards and visualizations. This software tool also delivers operational intelligence and secured system development.

Splunk Features

• This tool has a next generation analytical and monitoring solution.
• Data Ingestion and Indexing.
• Reduces troubleshooting and resolving time by offering instant results.
• Dashboards that show the search results in the form of charts, reports and pivots. Also offers enhanced GUI.
• It delivers a unified, single view for different IT services.
• Also extends the Splunk platform with purpose built solutions.
• Offers data driven analytical features with actionable insights.

Splunk Benefits

• Accelerate Development & Testing.
• Analyze system performance.
• Troubleshoot any failure conditions.
• Monitor business metrics.
• Search and investigate a particular outcome.
• Create a dashboard to visualize and analyze results.
• Store data and retrieve it for later use.

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10. Selenium

Selenium is one of the popular software testing frameworks used for web applications. This also provides an easy interface to develop automated tests.

Selenium Features

• This is a free open source tool.
• It also offers a multiplatform for various testing platforms such as Android and IOS
• Programming Languages: C#, Java, Python, Ruby on Rails and other.
• This is very easy to build a keyword driven web framework, mainly for Web drivers.
• This tool creates a robust regression automation process and test scripts.
• Supports parallel test execution that shortens time and increases the efficiency of tests.
• Simple Commands.

Selenium Benefits

• It can be used both for functional, compatibility, and regression testing.
• Testing tool for browser based testing of web applications.
• Script once, run on multiple browsers.
• Easy to learn, open source free software.
• Easy to convert the script into other languages.
• Supports multiple browser testing.

11. Terraform

Terraform is a popular open source infrastructure tool used as code software. Terraform is a user defined data center infrastructure service provider that uses various HashiCorp languages optionally it uses the JSON structure language rather than XML.

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Terraform Features

• Terraform server covers most AWS resources. It also supports other cloud services and also third party vendors.
• Terraform is open source and offers support plans like SaaS and terraform enterprises.
• The open source version of the terraform can be used only through the Command line interface (CLI).
• Terraform provides a command named plan, which offers a detailed overview of what will be modified if you apply the blueprint.
• Terraform supports the import and management of resources created outside of the Terraform.

Terraform Benefits

• Terraform tool can be used as reproducible infrastructure management.
• Reduces the production incident that arises due to environment configuration errors.
• Increases velocity and reliability.
• Eliminates the wait time for environment provisioning.
• Helps in cleaning the work environment.
• Reduces system management costs and lowers the risk of unexpected problems that arise when infrastructure modifications are implemented.

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12. AWS Cloud Formation

Another choice of top 20 Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for the Cloud AWS/Azure/GCP is AWS cloud formation .It is an infrastructure cloud based service that is provided by Amazon. This tool allows developers and businesses to easily create collaboration services related to AWS DevOps and third party resources.

AWS Cloud Formation Features

• Authoring with JSON/YAML.
• Extensibility.
• AWS Cloud Formation server offers to build server less applications with SAM (Serverless Application Model).
• Offers safety controls.
• Preview changes to the user environment.
• Dependency management.
• Cross accounts and cross region management.
• Extensibility.

AWS Cloud Formation Benefits

• AWS cloud formation lets you make a highly reliable, available, scalable, or upgradeable AWS infrastructure to cater to your specific application requirements.
• With cloud formation, it is easy to classify and station a suite of the secure platform’s resources.
• It allows you to describe any contingencies or special yardsticks to pass in during the run time.

13. Google Cloud Deployment Manager

Google cloud deployment manager is an infrastructure deployment service developed by Google Corp. This tool helps users to automate the creation and management of the google cloud resources.

Google Cloud Deployment Manager Features

• Provision and configure your deployment.
• Configuration as code.
• A declarative approach to configuration.
• Template driven.
• Supports YAML, jinja, and Python.
• Use schemas to constrain parameters.
• Reference control orders and dependencies.

Google Cloud Deployment Manager Benefits

• It offers a google compute engine (GCE) for computation purposes.
• It uses google cloud storage for storing data.
• It aims to offer “customer friendly” prices that beat the list prices of other providers.
• Offers virtual machine recommendations and cloud functions.

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14. Azure Resource Manager

Azure resource manager is a cloud service developed by Microsoft corporations. The service that it offers included is deployment and management cloud infrastructure service. It is like a management layer that allows users to create, delete, update or modify the resources in your Azure account.

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Azure Resource Manager Features

• Centralized Management.
• Security- the tool offers role based access controls (RBACs) and OAuth authentication.
• Azure Resource Manager ARM puts resources together in a container with Azure resource.
• A JSON (javascript object notation) file that defines one or more resources to deploy to a resource group, subscription, management groups  and tenants.

Azure Resource Manager Benefits

• It enables you to manage your infrastructure through declarative templates rather than scripts.
• You can deploy, manage and monitor all the resources for your solution as a group, rather than handling these resources later used to manage the things.
• It also allows you to re deploy the solutions throughout the development lifecycle.

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15. Pulumi

Pulumi is a newer infrastructure tool, and it gives modern approach to the actual code definition. Pulumi tool leverages powerful programming languages like C#, Python, Go, Ruby, and Javascript when dealing with infrastructure development. 

Pulumi Features

• Application delivery: navigate to production with containers and servlets.
• Infrastructure patterns: offers the architecture infrastructure for modern applications.
• Foundation all of AWS:  infrastructure as a code for all AWS resources and features.

Pulumi Benefits

• Helps to build reusable cloud infrastructure and  platforms that empower developers to build modern cloud applications faster with less overhead.
• Enables you to use engineering practices with infrastructure to replace inefficient, manual infrastructure processes with automation.
• Test and deliver infrastructure through CI/CD process or else automates the deployment with code at runtime.

16. SpectralOPS

SpectralOps is a lightning fast and developer first cloud cybersecurity that acts as a control planel over source code and other development assets. It finds and protects against harmful security errors in code, configurations and other artifacts.

SpectralOPS Features

• Monitor, classify and protect your code, assets, and infrastructure for exposed API keys, tokens, credentials and high risk security misconfigurations in a simple way.
• Spectral is an ever updating platform with new capabilities added every week.
• You can build your own detectors and policies to meet your internal security KPI’s.
• Offers more security, less time.

SpectralOPS Benefits

• Automates the processes of secret protection at build time. Monitor and detect API keys and various credentials.
• Eliminates the public blindspots: continuously uncover and monitor public blind spots, supply chain gaps, and proprietary code assets across multiple data sources.
• Helps you to apply and enforce your data policies.

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17. (R)?ex

(R)?ex is an open sourced deployment and configuration management tool used to simplify system administration and datacenter automation.

(R)?ex Features

• Automates repeatable tasks to save time and frustration
• Easy to learn by using Perl
• Uses ssh and is an agentless tool.

(R)?ex Benefits

• Put you in charge of development and testing.
• Easy to use.
• It’s uses Perl language.
• Open source software applications.
• Keep your configuration in sync.

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18. CFEngine

CFEngine is an IT infrastructure tool that automates essential large scale infrastructure of any complexity while maintaining speed, security, stability and scalability.

CFEngine Features

• Allows users to define the desired state and configuration of IT infrastructure while CFEngine ensures compliance.
• Available as both open source and commercial software.
• Automatically releases updates and changes to your infrastructure; regardless of the number of nodes.
• Utilizes autonomous agents to monitor nodes and ensure they are in the desired state.

CFEngine Benefits

• Powerful and customizable compliance reports ensure you meet your internal and external requirements.
• Enables you to configure different reports for various stakeholders.
• Allows you to keep your entire organization updated.

19. JuJu

JuJu is a deployment tool that helps organizations simplify their complex software’s scaling, configuration, and operation.You can access a wide range of best practice solutions which you can deploy with a single command.

JuJu Features

• Allows scripts to be bundled in order to easily deploy chunks of infrastructure at once.
• Deploys to private or public clouds.
• Provides reusable and repeatable workloads to configure open source software.
• Provides 24/7 monitoring and alerting to give you an available and secure tool.

JuJu Benefits

• Smart, flexible and scalable open source application
• Allows to create your own solution in the GUI (graphical user interface) or browse the store to get started.
• Managed JuJu infrastructure hosted by canonical.
• With JuJu, the relationship between the linked charms is formed automatically.

20. Otter

Last of the comparison of top 20 Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for the Cloud AWS/Azure/GCP is Otter . It is a tool from the Inedo Suite of DevOps products that allows organizations to provision their servers and manage configuration.

Otter Features

• Continuously monitors servers for configuration changes and reports when there is configuration drift, offering a variety of solutions for remediation
• Allows users to define reusable sets of configuration (roles) and scale infrastructure by assigning rules to any number of servers
• Availability of restrictive access. Allows permission to be granted to any user or group to the exact server or infrastructure needed while easily maintaining compliance and security on high value servers.

Otter Benefits

• Allows everyone on your team run complex scripts with a custom GUI that you develop around your script parameters.
• Enables development of advanced, multi server orchestrations without needing advanced coding skills.
• Defines desired state of configurations for your servers and also detects drifts from their actual configurations and also reconfigures as needed.

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Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for the Cloud AWS/Azure/GCP Conclusion

Cloud infrastructure is a game changer in today’s tech market due to its advanced features availability and major benefits over cloud computing platforms. We can say that this post is a mixture of all three popular cloud platform tools such as AWS DevOps, Azure, and GCP. In this top 20 infrastructure code cloud tools post, we have listed the most important tools of 2022, their features, and the benefits of using them. This blog may help a few Cloud communities, online experts, and cloud professionals worldwide.