Cloud orchestration is the process of automating the tasks that are required to manage connections and operations of workloads across cloud-based environments. It includes integrating automated tasks and processes into a workflow by using cloud orchestration technologies. It focuses on a systematic approach to maximizing the automation benefits of agility and cost reduction.
The term “cloud orchestration” also refers to a new category of tools that are designed to enable IT teams to manage interconnections and interactions between disparate systems in complex private and public cloud environments. With its end-to-end automation of services deployment, cloud orchestration allows organizations to rely on cloud infrastructure, platforms, and applications to deliver capabilities and services to users and the organization.
Cloud orchestration is the combination and coordination of tools, processes, and APIs that are used by organizations in public and private cloud environments. Cloud orchestration also includes coordinating the automated tasks to occur within the IT process. It orchestrates the automated tasks by aligning appropriate resources, timing, security protocols, and other various deployment methods to ensure that they are running correctly.
The coordination of these tasks takes place on the orchestration layer, which governs, controls, and coordinates service delivery among servers, security protocols, storage options, virtual machines, and networks. The layer is only accessible by cloud provider engineers, who are responsible for maintaining and updating it.
What is the difference between cloud orchestration and cloud automation?
Although cloud orchestration and cloud automation sound very similar and closely related, there are a few important differences. Cloud automation is a subset of cloud orchestration. Cloud automation focuses on a single task and methods to automate that specific task. Thus, cloud automation tools focus on automating singular processes.
On the other hand, cloud orchestration focuses on process flows for automated activities. The main goal of cloud orchestration is to combine a set of automated processes into a specified workflow to fully automate service delivery completely. Cloud orchestration turns these automated tasks into the building blocks to create more complex processes that involve multiple resources.
What are the benefits of cloud orchestration?
By orchestrating automated tasks, cloud orchestration allows organizations to reduce costs, save time, provide visibility, improve security, and prevent mistakes.
Optimization: Cloud orchestration can be considered as an integrator of automation. Bundling multiple tasks into a single optimized workflow simplifies optimization. Cloud orchestration can automate the provisioning of multiple servers, storage, databases, and networks, allowing organizations to make the deployment and management of processes and resources more effectively.
Visibility and Control: With a dashboard, organizations can benefit from an overall view of cloud resources, and along with its tools, it can automatically monitor and modify virtual machine instances to reduce manual work.
Reduced costs: Cloud orchestration reduces governance costs and also uses resources more economically. Cloud orchestration tools are optimized to improve the usage of cloud services to increase efficiency.
Eliminates human error: Cloud orchestration provides automation that minimizes human intervention, thus reducing the human error possibility as much as possible.
Supports DevOps: By automating server provisioning, network and server configurations, firewalls, and application testing and monitoring, cloud orchestration enables developers to focus on more valuable activities.
Business agility: Cloud orchestration enables organizations to create an organized, effective, and responsive cloud operating model to increase business agility. It also allows organizations to invest more time into growth and innovation.
Security: A successful cloud orchestration provides proper permissions and implements compliance parameters to secure applications.
What are the most popular cloud orchestration tools?
There are multiple cloud orchestration tools are platforms that offer Infrastructure-as-Code services, that are easy to use. There are both open-source solutions and managed orchestration services. Some of the most popular orchestration tools are:
- AWS CloudFormation
- IBM Cloud Orchestrator
- Red Hat Ansible
- Microsoft Azure Automation
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- Cloudify
- Morpheus
- AppFormix