What Are Cloud Tools?
IT departments face numerous challenges when placing and tuning workloads in the cloud, especially as they navigate a complex array of private and public cloud service offerings. Cloud tools are software applications designed to make these financial and technical decisions easier by offering more control and visibility into cloud operations.
Enterprises can leverage cloud computing tools, which encompass cloud management and cloud optimization efforts, to help maximize performance and cost savings throughout their cloud journey. Cloud tools help facilitate the transition from on-premises infrastructure to any variety of cloud deployment models—including private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and multicloud—and provide ongoing optimizations and enhancements as cloud deployments grow and reach maturity.
Consider the Benefits of Cloud Tools
Using cloud tools in cloud migrations and deployments has multiple benefits. With the right optimization tools and technologies, enterprises can:
- Optimize workload placement: Cloud tools analyze workloads and provide recommendations for the ideal system configuration and workload placement on cloud infrastructure. Many cloud tools are designed to identify hardware-level features in cloud instances, such as built-in AI acceleration engines, to help inform workload placement decisions.
- Reduce costs: Cloud tools provide insights into resource allocation, helping enterprises maximize their return on investment (ROI) by rightsizing their cloud infrastructure and helping prevent over- and underprovisioning.
- Improve reliability: Tools that support cloud orchestration can help enterprises dynamically scale cloud resources based on workload demands, helping prevent bottlenecks during periods of peak traffic and keep services and applications running smoothly.
- Deepen visibility: Cloud optimization and analytics tools provide visibility into resource use by analyzing workloads and cloud spending across multicloud and hybrid cloud environments. Organizations can use these insights to boost the impact of optimization efforts.
Plan Your Cloud Tool Implementation Strategy
Cloud tools are purpose-built to help with every stage of cloud transformation, whether your organization is planning its initial migration to the cloud or looking to maximize the value of existing cloud computing strategies and deployments.
Premigration: Simplified Planning
Before migrating, enterprises should understand their existing and future workload needs. Cloud tools can help simplify cloud migrations by providing workload discovery and migration assessments. These tools analyze your existing applications, workloads, and resource needs to help you develop a comprehensive strategy that supports your business goals. Some tools can also highlight cloud infrastructure needs to help inform what features you should look for when evaluating cloud service providers (CSPs).
Postmigration: Optimization
Once your organization makes it to the cloud, the next step is an ongoing optimization process to refine your cloud instance selection, performance, and cost. Cloud optimization tools provide instance recommendations based on past performance data to help match workloads to the most-suitable cloud instances. These recommendations consider your entire portfolio of cloud subscriptions and services, across public CSPs and private infrastructure, to give you the best results.
Understand Cloud Tool Use Cases
Cloud tools help streamline a variety of data center operations and workflows, including:
- Cloud management: Cloud tools from vendors including Red Hat, SUSE OpenStack, and Microsoft help IT teams manage cloud services, resource optimization, server virtualization, and compliance. In addition to available hardware optimizations, factors such as openness, hybrid architecture support, and container support should be considered when choosing a cloud management platform.
- Financial frameworks: Cloud computing tools help enable a financial operations (FinOps) framework by providing cost transparency and accountability, allowing your IT, development, and financial departments to stay in sync with your organization’s business plans and objectives.
- Task automation: Cloud tools enable automation to various degrees, from monitoring cloud use to provisioning new resources. Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as HashiCorp Terraform make it possible to define on-premises and cloud resources as configuration files, which your organization can use to automate resource provisioning through code.
- Application development: Cloud development tools and platforms can accelerate DevOps and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows by using hardware-level acceleration to optimize application performance.
Leverage Proven Cloud Tool Solutions from Intel
Intel-enabled cloud solutions can help you realize more value from your cloud investments. Intel works closely with CSPs and software vendors to deliver a range of optimization technologies through software stack integration. Additionally, Intel offers a variety of purpose-built cloud tools designed to enhance cloud computing operations.
Inform Cloud Migration Decisions with Insights Powered by Intel
Dr Migrate is an AI-enabled cloud migration assessment tool that analyzes your current digital estate and makes recommendations that align with your business goals. The platform is optimized to run on Intel® Xeon® processors to speed time to results and inform your decision-making with fast insights. You can also use the Intel® Xeon Processor Advisor Suite to access hardware-level recommendations for specific systems and instances by workload.
Select Cloud Instances That Run on a Robust Intel® Foundation
The latest Intel® Xeon® processors offer built-in Intel® Accelerator Engines to help boost performance, reduce costs, and improve power efficiency for demanding workloads in the cloud. Choosing cloud instances powered by Intel lets you benefit from these offerings to achieve fast results for AI, efficient storage and database performance, and enhanced security in multitenant environments.
Optimize Performance Even Further with Intel
Intel® Cloud Optimizer by Densify uses machine learning to analyze your organization’s workloads for the ideal cloud instance type best suited for them. The platform produces an ongoing series of recommendations that help organizations adopt more-cost-effective instance types or consolidate and optimize their contracts with CSPs, even for organizations with decentralized purchasing processes.
Scale Services Fast with Intel® Cloud Dev Tools
Test your services and workloads on the latest Intel® hardware using developer clouds. Developers can build, test, evaluate, and iterate on AI models and applications in cloud-hosted sandbox environments and then seamlessly scale up for production workloads. In addition to cloud development tools and platforms, Intel provides compilers, developer kits, code libraries, reference models, and more, along with training and support.