One of the great advantages of utilizing cloud computing is the ease with which companies and individuals can collaborate in a transparent and immediate manner.

Last week, IT operations solution provider OpDemand unveiled enhancements to its product that will help facilitate the collaborative management of cloud infrastructure for agile development teams. The OpDemand solution will now be able to securely share management duties and track changes to cloud systems with an intuitive, graphical news feed.

OpDemand users can manage cloud platforms that belong to other OpDemand users, and once they’re granted access, they can start, stop, deploy, clone, destroy, lock, unlock and post messages to shared platforms. The management actions will be published in the real-time news feed with an emphasis on who changed the platform, when and why. The graphical interface is built upon OpDemand’s GitHub integration.

Creating a so-called “master” OpDemand user and sharing environment with team members lets teams centralize access controls, cloud credentials, billing information and environment creation. Adding these centralized controls to the real-time audit trail offers the necessary security for team-based administration of production applications and services on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Users are required to have a metered OpDemand account to take advantage of these collaboration features, which software developers, operations engineers and system administators can sign up for free of charge to also gain access to the OpDemand Web console, command-line utilities, REST API and infrastructure blueprint library.