19 Best Cloud Orchestration Platforms Reviewed For 2024
10 Best Cloud Orchestration Tools Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 20 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
With so many different cloud orchestration platforms available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to automate and manage tasks across multiple cloud environments but need to figure out which tool is best. I've got you! In this post I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different cloud orchestration tools with a variety of teams and projects, with my picks of the best cloud orchestration platforms.
What Are Cloud Orchestration Platforms?
Cloud orchestration platforms are tools for automating and coordinating the management of cloud resources. They simplify the handling of complex cloud environments, integrating multiple services and processes into a unified system. These platforms manage the deployment, operation, and scaling of cloud-based applications and infrastructure.
The benefits of cloud orchestration platforms include enhanced efficiency through automation, reducing manual workload and error. They provide a streamlined approach to resource management, ensuring optimal use of cloud services. These platforms aid in cost-saving, improve security and compliance adherence, and offer scalability to meet varying demands. They are pivotal for organizations looking to maximize the potential of cloud computing.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Cloud Orchestration Platforms
Here’s a brief description of each of the cloud orchestration platforms to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the interface.
Best for dynamically scaling resources based on real-time demands
ActiveBatch is a cloud orchestration tool that serves as a single point of control, allowing organizations to coordinate existing application automation tools and consolidate end-to-end workload automation. This cross-platform solution integrates business systems such as project management, work order management, ERP, and CRMs.
ActiveBatch's task orchestration provides comprehensive visibility and robust monitoring. It also has a low-code framework with a predefined library of automation tasks. The platform dynamically scales resources based on real-time demands and historical analyses of past scheduling periods, allowing IT teams to optimize their virtual and cloud environments while minimizing costs.
Furthermore, the job queue function can automatically provision temporary cloud virtual machines for executing high-volume workloads. This allows for faster processing when needed, which is more cost-effective than an 'always-on' approach.
Deployments are supported across major platforms like Amazon EC2, VMWare, Microsoft Azure, and SC-VMM. You can use many endpoints to achieve native integrations with ActiveBatch’s low-code REST API adapter and connect to servers, services, applications, and APIs. ActiveBatch pricing is available upon request.
New Relic is cloud-based orchestration software that helps you monitor and manage your software's performance.
The platform's real-time analytics give you a live look at how your software is performing so you can spot any issues before they become big problems. It also has a feature called APM (Application Performance Monitoring) that lets you see how each part of your software is doing. This is helpful for pinpointing where any issues might be coming from.
Key features include backend monitoring, Kubernetes monitoring, mobile monitoring, model performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, log management, error tracking, network monitoring, vulnerability management, and browser monitoring.
Integrations include over 500 apps, like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure; CI/CD tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI; communication tools like Slack and PagerDuty; and other monitoring and analytics tools like Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk. It also has an API you can use to build custom integrations.
New Relic costs from $49/user/month and offers a free plan for 1 user and 100 GB/month of data ingest.
Best for managing load balancing and process priorities in cloud infrastructure
RunMyJobs is a cloud-based automation platform designed to streamline the integration and orchestration of IT and business processes. It offers a scalable approach to managing workflows across various disparate applications and environments without the need for on-premises infrastructure. It ensures high availability with a guaranteed 99.95% uptime and incorporates single-tenant cloud architecture that requires zero-effort maintenance.
Key features include unlimited connectors, process automation, workflow orchestration, and real-time dashboards for monitoring, alerts, and SLA notifications. RunMyJobs also offers flexible load balancing and process prioritization to eliminate bottlenecks and latency. Users can configure virtual machines and run scripts with self-updating, lightweight agents compatible with multiple OS including Windows, Linux, macOS, and more.
Furthermore, the platform is Cloud Security Alliance STAR Level 1 certified, ensuring top-tier security and reliability with complete cloud platform redundancy, mitigating any risk of a single point of failure.
RunMyJobs integrates with SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, Oracle, Datasphere, Databricks, Box, ServiceNow, Amazon S3, Azure, Boomi, Snowflake, SharePoint, and more.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Facilitates compliance and governance through controlled and auditable processes
- Scalable to adapt to growing organizational needs
- Enhances efficiency by automating repetitive tasks across IT and business processes
Cons:
- May be over-complex for smaller organizations or those with simpler needs
- Potential learning curve for users new to automation platforms
Cyclr
Creating powerful integration workflows with minimum effort and low engineering overhead
Cyclr is an embedded integration platform. It provides a scalable connection architecture that allows organizations to deliver native integration directly from their apps. This empowers SaaS applications with automation and powerful integration workflows.
Cyclr provides an orchestration layer to create connections with hundreds of third-party integrations. The software comes with a library of connectors that gives you a range of methods, actions, and events to activate when connecting to data sources.
Its low-code toolkit and drag-and-drop interface are suitable for those lacking much technical expertise who nonetheless want to build meaningful integrations and move data between applications with ease.
The monthly fees for its Startup and Growth product tiers are $899, and $1,799 respectively. Its Scale offering is listed as a customizable product, with pricing contingent upon selected features.
Cloudify
Interoperability fostered through a single pane of glass consolidated view of cloud infrastructure
Cloudify is an open-source DevOps automation solution that makes it easy to manage all your automation tools in one platform. This central point of management is built on automation portrayed as “Environment as a Service” that comprises built-in integrations and toolchains that allow it to manage heterogeneous environments.
In addition to providing multi-cloud and hybrid support, Cloudify is designed with an open architectural model that’s suitable for pluggability. Cloudify automates DevOp processes, allowing you to manage apps effectively, especially those with a high degree of complexity.
The platform is suited for those who desire to work on hybrid clouds and stacks without having to change their existing codebase, workflow, or processes. Cloudify brings together the best practices of automation and orchestration throughout the process of continuous transformation.
Cloudify’s Terraform Only plan, which targets Terraform teams, is free. Its All Technologies plan is free for 30 days. Its Starter and Pro plans are priced at $1,000 / month and $4,750 / month respectively. Cloudify’s Enterprise plan’s pricing is available upon request.
Creating a seamless experience across multi-cloud environments
BMC Multi-cloud management is a portfolio of solutions that offers services like multi-cloud migration and streamlining service delivery to provide a consistent, optimal end-user experience. It’s a multi-cloud service management that strives to provide the highest speed and accuracy to multi-channel environments at the lowest cost. It seeks to continuously optimize both cloud IT costs and capacity based on an organization’s business demands.
The software provides these services under a portfolio of featured solutions like BMC Helix ITSM, which handles service management with intelligent automation. BMC Helix Cloud Security provides enterprises with audit trails for its automated cloud resource configurations. In addition, it aspires to be user-friendly to the less tech-savvy by providing automated remediation without coding or scripting.
BMC provides free trials for its portfolio of products for an unspecified duration. Pricing is provided upon request.
Simplifies cloud operations with transparency that enhances compliance, governance, and financial accountability
CloudHealth simplifies cloud operations by providing a single solution to undertake multi-cloud management systems. It is designed to help you manage resources while providing transparency across private and public cloud infrastructure.
CloudHealth’s real-time visibility, combined with its automatic data gathering capabilities, facilitates continuous cloud monitoring and performance analysis. The in-depth insights garnered enables businesses to optimize resources more effectively.
Also, its granular visibility into cloud operations enables businesses to adhere to compliance and governance policies. Moreover, CloudHealth allows you to report expenditure by cost center, which enhances financial accountability.
Due to its operational visibility, CloudHealth is ideal for cost-sensitive customers who need to stay on budget. CloudHealth integrates seamlessly with public cloud platforms and technologies like Ansible, Amazon, Google Cloud Platform, and Jira Cloud, among others.
CloudHealth provides a free trial for an unspecified period. Pricing is provided upon request.
Kubernetes is a powerful, popular, open-source container orchestration platform built by Google. Kubernetes has a complex infrastructure and huge ecosystem. However, its architecture is intricate in order to allow your applications to operate simply.
Kubernetes provides provisioning, load balancing, and container abstraction in the way of Pods. It also offers cluster management and deployment, logging, security, service discovery, turnkey scalability, and a host of other advanced features. It has APIs that automate provisioning and resource management processes so you don’t have to do it yourself.
However, Kubernetes can be an overkill for environments that don’t require its vast resources. Moreover, it requires a significant learning curve to grasp its complexities. But you reap the reward several times over in terms of productivity, especially with regards to managing containers at scale.
Kubernetes is suited for those who have to manage containerized applications at scale, who need to employ resilient container-based workloads. Kubernetes has proven so popular that all major cloud vendors currently support it for their customers out-of-the-box.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is open-source but customers are billed for the resources and workloads created and used.
IBM Cloud Orchestrator is a user-friendly, highly customizable, and configurable cloud management platform. It provides automation tools to help DevOps to manage and oversee resources along the spectrum of private, public, and hybrid clouds.
The platform offers integrated IT workflow capabilities that include resource management, cost management, process automation, and IT governance.
IBM Cloud Orchestrator is equipped with toolkits that give users the building blocks to create a robust cloud infrastructure. It provides easy deployment, with simplified management and improved service delivery times. IBM presents you with a choice of either IBM Cloud Orchestrator or IBM Cloud Orchestrator Enterprise Edition.
IBM Cloud Orchestrator range of governance automation capabilities streamlines processes to stay in regulatory compliance.
IBM Cloud Orchestrator doesn’t offer any free trials. Pricing is available upon request.
Easy setup, deployment, and management of AWS resources in a repeatable manner
AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure automation platform. It is used on the popular Amazon Web Services cloud platform as an infrastructure of code tool.
CloudFormation’s software-defined infrastructure lets organizations to provision, model, and manage both their AWS and third-party resources efficiently and effectively. It offers the choice of either YAML or JSON to automate resource management and even model your entire cloud environment.
Using built-in templates, administrators can provision, scale, manage, and deploy cloud infrastructure in multiple environments. As a managed AWS service, CloudFormation provides immense advantages with its interoperability and integration with other AWS solutions like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and AWS Service Catalog, among others.
The platform is designed for those on AWS who want to reduce errors and inconsistencies of manual configuration.
AWS CloudFormation utilizes usage-based pricing and provides price estimates via its AWS Price Calculator.
The Best Cloud Orchestration Platforms Summary
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| ActiveBatch | Pricing upon request | Website |
| New Relic | From $25/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
| RunMyJobs by Redwood | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Cyclr | From $2,095/year | Website |
| Cloudify | $1,000 / month and $4,750 / month respectively. | Website |
| BMC Multi-Cloud Management | No details | Website |
| CloudHealth | No details | Website |
| Kubernetes | Open source project and available for free | Website |
| IBM Cloud Orchestrator | Price available upon request. | Website |
| AWS CloudFormation | Pricing upon request | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
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Here are a few other honorable mentions that didn’t make the top list.
Comparison Criteria
Here's the summary of what I look for when evaluating the best cloud orchestration platforms:
- User Interface (UI): A user and web interface that’s easy to understand and navigate. This is vital because cloud orchestration platforms are often multilayered ecosystems.
- Usability: Since cloud orchestrators are fairly complex systems, a user experience that enhances effectiveness and efficiency should be a highly sought objective of the platform.
- Integrations: The best platforms provide users with flexibility through both in-built and out-of-the-box integrations that supply functionality that isn’t native to the platform.
- Value for $: Even the most awesome features in a product need to be balanced against its cost-effectiveness. So, value for money reflects the utility of cost, quality, and ability to meet customer needs that the platform provides.
Cloud Orchestration Platforms: Key Features
These are some of the key features a cloud orchestration platform needs to be productive, deliver value, and meet customer expectations.
- Infrastructure as code: This reflects the ability of the platform to allow provisioning and managing of its underlying infrastructure through machine-readable code rather than manual processes or physical hardware configuration.
- Container orchestration: Containerized applications have become the de facto standard for packaging and delivering software efficiently, especially on cloud platforms. As a result, a cloud orchestration platform should have an effective and efficient way of managing and deploying containers.
- Multi-cloud support: Cloud computing is currently all the rage. Hence, a cloud orchestration platform must be adept at load balancing, scaling, and generally managing cloud workloads on the fly. It should be able to support private, public, and hybrid cloud models.
- API Automation: By necessity, cloud orchestration platforms need to juggle and coordinate complex, interconnected systems, tasks, and workflows. Hence, the need for well-rounded automation, typically administered through APIs, to configure and control a vast array of resources.
The Importance of Cloud Orchestration Platforms
The cloud optimizes the utilization of resources through on-demand delivery of IT resources. Cloud adoption and the rising complexity of today's IT environments have created the need for cloud orchestration platforms. Since its inception a couple of years ago, cloud adoption is steadily rising across industries.
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