There has been a significant increase in the number of Cloud service providers and cloud-based software consumers. The unending pressure on the Cloud market to deliver on its promises doesn’t seem to cease despite emergence of new IT and DevOps capabilities such as AIOps, RPA and containerization. In fact, all this has led to SaaS sprawl within cloud ecosystem. Nevertheless, cloud providers understand the importance of “orchestrating” a superior cloud resource management, and delight customers with maximized efficiency and profitability.
Why Orchestrate Cloud Resources?
With an ever-changing cloud infrastructure, most IT leaders find it extremely hard to optimize costs and remediate threats. Limited insights into multi-cloud environment scare away IT heads from making full usage of their modern infrastructure. Cloud orchestration is a fast-growing aspect of IT management that can significantly improve the manageability, efficiency, and coordination of multi-tools and approaches in complex cloud environments. With cloud orchestrating resources, managing Cloud-tools and analytics become more organized, agile and scalable.
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In this article, we would define cloud orchestration and its importance in managing cloud resources in containerized environments. Let’s start.
Understanding Cloud Orchestration through the Lens of Top Cloud Players
Cloud resource orchestration or simply cloud orchestration is a complex process of selection, deployment, monitoring, analysis and security governance of different cloud resources in real-time. Cloud Orchestration achieves the ultimate goal of seamless interaction of all cloud-hosted resources by meeting the QoS parameters.
There is still a need to define cloud orchestration from a cloud consumer’s perspective. Let’s discuss more.
Cloud orchestration could mean many things to different customers. We compiled the top definitions from the industry so that you can summarize them all at one place.
According to VMware, “Cloud Orchestration is the process of automating the tasks needed to manage connections and operations of workloads on private and public clouds.” These technologies integrate automation into a workflow to perform specific business functions based on permission.
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Cloud Orchestration takes care of containerization and server workloads by orchestrating multiple tasks using VMs for services, workloads and cloud resources or tools.
Cloud orchestration platforms utilize IaaS providers to fully-automate and scale Cloud deployments for better coordination, arrangement and end-to-end permission management in a multi-cloud environment.
We found IBM’s cloud orchestration best-suited for explanation to general audience.
According to IBM, “Cloud orchestration is the end-to-end automation of the deployment of services in a cloud environment. More specifically, it is the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware, and services—all of which helps to accelerate the delivery of IT services while reducing costs.”
IBM added — “Cloud orchestration is used to manage cloud infrastructure, which supplies and assigns required cloud resources to the customer like the creation of VMs, allocation of storage capacity, management of network resources, and granting access to cloud software.”
Cloud Orchestration is your North Star for integrating Cloud-based tools, APIs and infrastructure in Private, Public and Multi-cloud ecosystems and workflows. According to Red Hat, orchestration all of cloud resources at one place reduces redundancy across teams and domains, improve efficiency of cloud computing systems, and makes maintenance simpler and easier as cloud systems mature within the organization.
Cisco Cloud solutions provided a definition too. It says, “Cloud orchestration is the combined automation of apps, workloads, supporting resources, and infrastructure across one or more cloud platforms—public and/or private. It commonly includes imperative and/or declarative methods to drive automation.”
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Another powerful explanation is listed here. It states – “Cloud orchestration is the practice of automating the actions that are required to manage workload connections and operations on private and public clouds. Automated tasks and processes are integrated into a workflow to accomplish specific business functions…”
Why businesses need Cloud Orchestration tools?
Cloud orchestration is delivered via 3 models: SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. There are three forms of cloud orchestration: workload orchestration, resource orchestration and service orchestration. Orchestration, being more complex than automation, requires syncing between various tools and techniques such as Progress Chef, Juju and Puppet.
Companies need cloud orchestration to meet the ever-growing demands of IT teams that are building infrastructure with Microservices and Containerized workflows. Cloud automation has enabled users to quickly scale their operations by bringing in powerful containerized and micro-services. These tools communicate with the Cloud resources through APIs that increase the complexity of workflow, reduce agility and burden security and IT threat management.
To solve these, businesses rely on Cloud orchestration capabilities that manage the automation tasks and free up resources for enhanced productivity. The ultimate objective of cloud orchestration is to enable the organization with seamless power to adopt a hybrid cloud architecture while managing dependencies across multiple clouds, with policy-driven security and management capabilities.
Businesses that switch to cloud orchestration manage to considerable reduce the dependence on IT staff to handle automation, significantly reducing errors.
- Optimization of IT staff
- Reduction in manual errors
- Accelerated deployment of applications across hybrid IT infrastructure
- Improved experience for users and customers enterprise-wide
- Improved coordination of complex hybrid environments
- Provisioning of self-service with little or no IT intervention
- Better tracking of IT resources
- Seamless migration and integration of data across clouds, and between Public/Private architectures
- Add-on integration with the existing identity and access management systems
Top Cloud orchestration vendors and their products include the following:
- AWS CloudFormation
- BMC Multi Cloud
- Ret Hat Ansible
- CloudBolt
- Cisco CloudCenter
- CloudFX
- Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator
- Fugue
- IBM Cloud Orchestrator
- Ingram Micro Cloud Orchestrator
- Microsoft Azure Automation
- Microsoft Cycle Computing
- Morpheus
- OpenStack Heat orchestration engine
- Saltstack
- Zymr
But, cloud orchestration is not needed at all times.
Companies that use Snowflake’s Native Application Framework do not need orchestration. It provides the users with the ability to develop their own code sources and execute them using Snowflake database.With Edge and virtualization coming into picture, we would see more players making a distinct leap at cloud-native orchestrations and automate a part or entire data pipelines with an eye on one thing– validate cloud spending made by CIOs to secure a solid foundation for digital transformation and data security.
