Get the Right Cloud Computing Tools to Manage Amazon, Google Services

Why have only one server when you can have as many as you need, on demand? That's the premise behind cloud computing -- harnessing whole reams of processor and storage power without actually having to provision them yourself. But if you're without the right tools for the job, it's that much harder to reap the full gamut of benefits from working in the cloud.

The tools you have at your disposal are likely to be limited, if not dictated entirely, by the cloud computing service you've chosen. A good deal of this is due to cloud computing interfaces -- the application programming interfaces mainly -- not being interchangeable. The applications themselves that are run in the cloud, the stuff you provide, are only part of the picture. How you get it into the cloud, and deal with it from that point on, is also crucial.

To that end, the tools I'll be exploring deal with two things: 1) creating new apps or moving existing ones into a cloud-computing environment, and 2) managing them once you get them there. Most of the tools available right now concentrate on the most popular and well-known of the cloud-computing infrastructures out there -- namely,Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Web Services -- although some of them also offer services for Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s App Engine.

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