Cloud management tooling enables organizations to manage hybrid and multicloud (that is, on-premises, public cloud and edge) services and resources. This includes providing governance, life cycle management, brokering and automation for managed cloud infrastructure resources across multiple functional areas. The tooling can be procured and operated by central IT organizations, such as I&O, cloud center of excellence (CCOE) and platform engineering/operations, or within specific lines of business. It can be deployed on-premises, in a customer’s public cloud account or purchased as a SaaS.
Gartner defines container management as offerings that enable the deployment and operation of containerized workloads. Delivery methods include stand-alone software or as a service. Delivery methods include cloud, managed service and software for containers running on-premises, in the public cloud and/or at the edge. Container management automates the provisioning, operation and life cycle management of containerized workloads at scale. Centralized governance and security policies are used to manage container workloads and associated resources. Container management supports the requirements of modern applications (also refactoring legacy applications), including platform engineering, cloud management and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Benefits include improved agility, elasticity and access to innovation.
Gartner defines privileged access management (PAM) as tools that provide an elevated level of technical access through the management and protection of accounts, credentials and commands, which are used to administer or configure systems and applications. PAM tools — available as software, SaaS or hardware appliances — manage privileged access for both people (system administrators and others) and machines (systems or applications). Gartner defines four distinct tool categories for PAM tools: privileged account and session management (PASM), privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM), secrets management, and cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM).
Gartner defines the service mesh market as the market for distributed computing middleware that enables, secures and optimizes communications between services running primarily in container management systems. A service mesh provides lightweight mediation, dynamic service discovery, request routing, observability, traceability and communication security. The service mesh is a technology that provides software infrastructure for communications between distributed application components deployed mainly in container management systems such as Kubernetes. This type of middleware helps manage and monitor service-to-service (east-west) communications, especially among microservices within an application domain. It also provides visibility into service interactions, enabling proactive operations and faster diagnostics. It automates complex communication concerns, thereby improving security, developer productivity and ensuring that standards and policies are enforced consistently across applications.