Orchestration and Automation

Orchestration in cloud computing refers to automation required to deploy services in the cloud (Venugopal, 2016). As the name suggests, such automation is required to coordinate the computer systems, software, and services so that the cloud services come across seamlessly to the customers. The actual orchestration "automates the automation" (Venugopal, 2016), ensuring the correct order of tasks takes place. Automation takes care of the individual tasks; orchestration looks more at the IT process and workflow (Watts, 2017).

Orchestration is the latest step in enhancing the IT environment process, in which everything used to be done in-house manually. Virtualization and the emergence of cloud computing allowed for automation and enabled significant cost reductions.

Cloud orchestration can be defined into three components: resources, workloads, and services (Venugopal, 2016).

Orchestration can be accomplished by using automation tools. Chef and Puppet are similar programs that configure, deploy, and manage applications; Chef works well with automation on the level of the operating system (servers, patches, etc)., while Puppet is for midlevel operations such as installing databases (Venugopal, 2016).

OpenStack is an open-source infrastructure as a service tool that features an orchestration tool called Heat. Heat can be used instead of writing a script to manage software in OpenStack (Venugopal, 2016). Juju is another open-source tool for deploying services in Ubuntu. Docker is an open tool that is used for both orchestration and virtualization (Venugopal, 2016).

AWS offers the CloudFormation Designer (Designer), a drag-and-drop interfaced graphic tool for creating, viewing, and modifying AWS CloudFormation templates.

References

Venugopal, S. (2016, July 11). Cloud orchestration technologies: Explore your options. Retrieved from https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloud-orchestration-technologies-trs/index.html

Watts, S. (2017, December 22). IT orchestration vs. automation: What's the difference? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.bmc.com/blogs/it-orchestration-vs-automation-whats-the-difference/