The current landscape is an interesting mix of proprietary, vendor-locked tooling and cross-cloud compatible open source tooling. Some of these tools are primarily focused on managing the lifecycle of IaaS and PaaS services from providers, while some of them are traditional configuration management tools – capable of automating host/virtual machine configurations – that have been “bolted onto” to work with IaaS and PaaS services (though mostly as an afterthought). As we consider these
tools, we’ll consider the following: