What Is Cloud Orchestration?

Cloud orchestration is a method for managing IT operations in the cloud more efficiently by facilitating the automation of frequent, time-consuming IT-related tasks. Cloud service providers (CSPs), enterprises in data-reliant industries, Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, and businesses that focus heavily on application development can benefit the most from cloud orchestration.

How Does Cloud Orchestration Work?

Enterprise IT departments oversee cloud services, resources, and applications across various platforms, interface protocols, and infrastructure, often across multiple public and private cloud environments. Cloud orchestration helps to coordinate these efforts, ensuring that tasks are scheduled and carried out consistently across the entire cloud computing environment.

Cloud orchestration tools and software provide a unified management layer for organizing common IT tasks in the cloud. These policy-based programs include open source platforms (OpenStack, Kubernetes), products from independent software vendors, and provider-specific tools (AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager).

Cloud Orchestration vs. Cloud Automation

In a cloud environment, the orchestration layer sits on top of cloud automation tools, which are used to automate various tasks related to the management and deployment of resources, applications, and system configurations. Cloud orchestration can be thought of as a conductor in an orchestra, while the automation tasks are the individual musicians. Together, cloud orchestration and automation help IT teams direct large-scale, complex cloud environments.

Container Orchestration in the Cloud

A cloud container is a stand-alone software package with an entire runtime environment for running a program, workload, or specific task. Valued for their flexibility, efficiency, and portability, containers support cloud-native applications, stateless microservices, and applications that must scale across a range of environments. Container orchestration tools and platforms (Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos) help streamline the deployment and management of containerized applications.

Benefits of Cloud Orchestration

Cloud orchestration allows enterprise IT to manage compute resources that span multiple clouds or on-premises infrastructure more easily. Benefits of cloud orchestration include:
 

• Operational efficiency: Organizing automated tasks into end-to-end workflows helps save time, effort, and resources, resulting in greater efficiency and cost savings. This practice also helps reduce manual errors.
• Observability: A centralized dashboard pulls together operational data from various tools and systems, providing visibility into the operational state of the enterprise cloud. Some cloud orchestration dashboards feature advanced telemetry that maps resource usage and network topology, facilitating better decision-making.
• Agility: Cloud orchestration enables self-service capabilities, allowing business units and development teams to provision cloud resources within specified limits and without direct intervention from IT staff. Also, CSPs can enact “pay-as-you-go” business models.
• Cost efficiency: Automated metering and chargebacks help organizations better govern and control their costs, promoting an economic use of resources.
• Reliability: Event-driven or policy-based remediation enables some cloud orchestration platforms to automatically detect and respond to vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance violations. This helps minimize downtime and uphold service level agreements (SLAs).

Challenges Addressed by Cloud Orchestration

Cloud orchestration aims to eliminate common cloud management-level pain points and challenges, including:
 

• Cloud instance sprawl: As enterprises invest in more cloud services in multicloud and hybrid cloud deployment models, administrative and software licensing costs can increase dramatically. Cloud orchestration makes it easier to manage cloud environments at scale, consolidate workloads into fewer instances, and migrate workloads to their ideal cloud service or type.
• Over- and underprovisioning: Workload fluctuations can result in underutilized cloud resources or cost overruns from spinning up new instances to meet spikes in demand. With cloud orchestration, improved visibility and control allow management to monitor and dynamically scale resources based on need.
• Policy enforcement: By automating security, compliance, and operational rules, cloud orchestration helps enforce cloud management and access policies consistently as the enterprise grows.

Cloud Orchestration Use Cases

Cloud orchestration has many use cases within enterprises, CSPs, SaaS providers, and software-centric businesses. Some of them include:

Resource Management

Cloud orchestration can coordinate the automation of resource provisioning, allocation, and infrastructure management.

Data Pipelines

Cloud orchestration tools help automate workflows in preparing enterprise data for analytics, allowing data tasks to be scheduled, monitored, scaled, and performed consistently.

Application Life Management

Some cloud orchestration tools work alongside configuration management tools to streamline the automated deployments of applications, updates, package installations, and system configurations, helping to maintain the system or application’s desired state. They also enable continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and development practices.

Policy Enforcement

The orchestration layer executes rules that help enforce security policies, resource allocation limits, and compliance with data laws and regulations.

Cloud Migration

Cloud orchestration can help simplify the highly involved workflows of migrating legacy applications to the cloud while maintaining service levels and helping prevent data loss and errors.

The Future of Cloud Orchestration

Many enterprises already rely on cloud orchestration and will rely on it more in the future. Enterprises need centralized cloud management platforms and tools to keep pace with staffing shortages in key operations roles, the continual rise of hybrid and multicloud deployment models, and an industry shift from legacy systems to orchestration containers and cloud-native applications.

Furthermore, cloud orchestration paves the way for the adoption of new technologies, including the deployment and management of AI applications across cloud and on-premises environments. Cloud orchestration is also a requirement for self-healing data centers that can use telemetry to identify and remediate service issues. By incorporating cloud orchestration solutions into a cloud management strategy, technical leaders can drive innovation, reduce complexity, and promote agility throughout the organization.