When a business decides to run apps in the cloud or otherwise use cloud infrastructure, a big challenge is managing resources across disparate systems. It’s worth remembering that companies rarely use just one specific service within one particular cloud provider.
At any medium to large-sized business, there is often a mix of private and public clouds and multiple service providers. All organizations need a good way to manage the interconnections and dependencies within their cloud infrastructures. This is where orchestration comes in.
What is Cloud Orchestration?
Cloud orchestration uses code to automatically provision resources and services in a cloud environment. Orchestration takes a series of separate automated tasks and coordinates them within a workflow. The premise is that managed, controlled automation is more efficient than keeping automated tasks siloed and unmanaged, which can create confusion.
More specifically, the tasks within an orchestration workflow in cloud computing can involve the following:
- Starting or provisioning new servers
- Adding extra storage capacity
- Spinning up new virtual machine instances
- Accessing cloud-based software services
Benefits of Cloud Orchestration
There are several reasons beyond greater efficiency that businesses might want to consider cloud orchestration, including:
- Auditing cloud use
With a complex multi-cloud setup, it’s difficult for IT support teams to maintain visibility and control over cloud use on their own. Orchestration provides a unified view of cloud resources, which facilitates better monitoring. The result is increased control of your cloud environment and improved implementation of IT security policies and cloud usage guidelines.
- Reduced costs
An additional benefit stemming from how orchestration enables visibility is more economic use of cloud resources. Unused servers are quickly identified and automatically switched off, which avoids unnecessary expenses. Network admins can maintain control of the virtual machines on their network. Coordinated automation generally requires less human labor and consumes only the necessary resources for the company’s cloud workloads, both of which save money.
- Simplified automation
Automation on its own is useful, but it can introduce complexities. Because automation handles individual tasks, it can lead to confusion about what needs automating and when. With orchestration, everything is integrated into a unified workflow, leading to greater clarity and simplicity.
- Event-driven remediation
When any company uses the cloud, things are bound to go wrong now and then. Disks may run out of space for your primary storage, not enough servers might be provisioned to deal with traffic spikes on business applications. One of the great things about orchestration is its ability to provide organizations with event-driven remediation. If a disk runs out of space, new storage space is automatically provisioned via the orchestration tool(s).
- Improved agility
Modern IT businesses need to be agile, which means they need to be able to rapidly respond to change. A business is only as agile as its IT infrastructure, though. Orchestration is hugely important for achieving improved agility through the intelligent and automatic provisioning of resources across storage, computing, and networking cloud infrastructure.
Popular Cloud Orchestration Tools
There is a slew of cloud orchestration tools available to businesses. Some are orchestration-specific; others facilitate orchestration through IT task automation. Here are some examples:
- Bolt
- Morpheus
- IBM Cloud Orchestrator
- AWS CloudFormation
- Ansible
- Puppet