Published Date: November 2, 2022
In information technology (IT), orchestration is the process of automatically configuring, coordinating and managing computer systems and software. The goal of orchestration is to help the IT department more easily manage complex hardware, software implementations and workflows, as well as ensure that configurations meet business and end-user requirements.
Modern IT systems are often made up of multiple components, hardware and software, which are located on premises, in the cloud and in hybrid environments. As these elaborate systems grow, they become even more complex and interconnected over time. Managing all aspects of these systems has grown beyond the capabilities of the IT team without the aid of automation. Orchestration helps to make the job easier by performing many of the core functions automatically.
Automation and orchestration are not the same but they are related and complementary. Automation in the context of IT generally refers to automating a single task, for instance a repetitive task that can be performed by the system without requiring human intervention. Orchestration relies on automation but in a broader and more holistic sense, looking at how to automate a process or workflow rather than a single task. In other words, automated processes can be orchestrated to work together to achieve specific goals and outcomes.
Orchestration can be used to automate a wide variety of IT processes including server provisioning, incident management, database management, creating virtual machines, application orchestration as well as many other tasks and workflows.
In this article we’ll give an overview of IT orchestration, including the fundamentals, how it differs from IT automation, how it works in different paradigms like the cloud and containers, how to choose an orchestration tool and some best practices for getting started.
Why is IT orchestration important?
Orchestration is important and valuable to modern IT organizations for speed, scale and efficiency. Most IT departments find themselves facing a growing list of tasks and responsibilities without a corresponding growth in headcount or budget. The increased workload also leads to a high degree of fatigue, and many IT leaders find themselves unable to hire the talent they need to keep their teams fully functioning. In addition, the more that is expected of teams and the more responsibilities they have, the greater the possibility of human error.
Orchestration can help IT teams meet their biggest challenges and streamline the most repetitive, complex and least rewarding tasks of IT administration — handling them quickly, efficiently and effectively, without requiring human intervention.
Taking the most repetitive tasks and workflows off the plate of administrators frees them to address challenges that require the most imagination to solve, as well as allow them to plan, implement and explore new opportunities for digital transformation.
For example, rather than finding every instance of that line of code and rewriting it, which could lead to omissions and errors, a developer could write a script to do the work, replacing the code in every instance with the new code.
Ultimately, orchestration can lead to faster time-to-market for nearly any technology-driven organization. A summary of benefits includes:
- Faster development times
- Automation of large, time-consuming and repetitive tasks
- More efficient server and application management
- Reduced possibility of human error
- Integrated permission checks
- Savings in overall IT costs
- Improved team collaboration and productivity
- Standardized workflows and processes
- Improved employee morale, engagement and retention
What is the difference between orchestration and automation?
Automation refers to tasks, whereas orchestration is the automation of linked tasks.
The difference between IT orchestration and automation is in the way they are applied. Automation generally refers to any of thousands of single tasks, such as sending an IT alert, launching a web server or routing an email. Orchestration is the automation — through Robotic Program Automation (RPA) bots or automated scripts, for example — of a series of linked tasks designed to operate together. Often in IT when we use the term automation, we’re actually referring to orchestration. Automation, in other words, refers to a task whereas orchestration refers to a workflow or process.
Automation can be considered a subset of orchestration, since only automated processes can be orchestrated; a manual process cannot.
Orchestration is also more complex. Automation tools can be applied to simple “if this, then that'' processes. Orchestration takes the practice a step further into more involved interactions involving coordination and decision-making. Orchestration can:
- Build on the output of an automated task.
- Perform multiple actions based on that output.
- Select different tasks based on different outputs and conditions.
- Perform and coordinate multiple individual tasks simultaneously.
If the process is linear — that is, dependent on a series of if-then statements that drive decisions one after another — then it is automated. If the process can branch out into multiple directions that occur simultaneously based on a variety of inputs, then it is orchestrated.
What does orchestration mean in the cloud?
Orchestration in the cloud refers to the process of using orchestration to create streamlined and automated business processes in a cloud environment.
Orchestration in the cloud provides the same benefits as it does in an on-premises environment, delivering services faster and managing efficient operation. Orchestration reduces the number of people required to provision a cloud-based service and helps prevent errors, contributing to improved delivery of cloud services to end users.
There are three main aspects of cloud orchestration: service, workload and resource orchestration. An orchestration platform coordinates their activities to enable essential functions relating to cloud servers, networking and software.
Orchestration helps unify all the various functions in a cloud, multicloud or hybrid cloud environment to make them work together more effectively and ensure availability, scalability, failure recovery, the ability to work with dependencies and other tasks. Orchestration also provides a higher degree of visibility into cloud computing processes, allowing greater insight into capacity, real-time resource management, security and other key attributes.
What is orchestration in big data?
Orchestration in big data (or data orchestration) is the centralized control of processes that manage data across disparate systems, data centers or data lakes. In the same way that orchestration can make applications run faster and more efficiently by automating multiple complementary processes, data orchestration makes it faster and more effective for organizations to access their data stored in multiple locations and make it available to use.
Data orchestration is performed by a data orchestration platform, which is a middleware application that sits between the data warehousing tools and the applications that use the data, such as a business analytics application, customer relationship management (CRM) tool or other business applications.
Data orchestration allows rapid integration into a data-driven process, making it easier for an organization’s IT department to bring new data sources online. Data orchestration automates much of the process of adding additional data sources, making it faster and more efficient, without the need for custom code or implementation.
What is orchestration in DevOps?
DevOps orchestration is the process of orchestration when performed in a DevOps environment, with the goal of reducing production issues in applications and speeding time to market. In the same way that orchestration can speed up IT processes and make them more efficient, orchestration can automate and accelerate multiple application development processes.
DevOps bridges the gap between “dev” and “ops” — in other words, software development, where the code behind applications is created, and IT operations, where those applications are put into production, available to end users and maintained across the app’s lifecycle.
DevOps solves a bottleneck problem associated with agile development. If agile developers are producing new software or code updates at a higher frequency, then traditional operations teams will struggle to get the software tested and push live in a timely manner.
IT orchestration ties in with the DevOps goal of deploying applications faster, in that it can help to automate workflows and accelerate processes, ensuring that both the developers and operations teams can do their jobs at the same pace. DevOps teams use both automation and orchestration: automation for individual tasks and orchestration for IT processes.
What does orchestration mean in Kubernetes?
Kubernetes orchestration is the process of automatically building and managing applications across multiple containers, which otherwise would need to be done manually. Orchestration is a key feature — and benefit — of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is itself a container orchestration tool.
Containers are software units into which you can pack an application, along with everything required to run that application, to make it easier to implement. To better understand how containers function, imagine an empty box. In this box (or container), you can put an application’s code, its system tools, configuration files and any other dependencies required for it to work, and then later unpack it (or, rather, deploy it) elsewhere — on a local machine, a public cloud or a private data center.
As an open source software that performs container orchestration, Kubernetes can manage, scale and deploy containerized applications like Docker. Kubernetes users can define the kind of container architecture they want and the software automatically schedules containers to run within those parameters based on the compute resources available, even if the containers are on multiple applications and hosts.
Kubernetes can dramatically enhance the development process by simplifying container management, automating updates and scaling, and minimizing downtime so developers can focus on improving and adding new features to applications.
What is API orchestration?
API orchestration is the process of integrating two or more applications into a single offering. In a world of digital services, APIs are essential to allowing multiple processes — for example, multiple steps in a purchase transaction — to happen simultaneously. API orchestration is designed to allow these multiple processes to work together as coordinated functions.
An application programmer interface (API) is a software tool that allows applications to communicate with one another. As a set of established protocols, it allows an application created by one party to interact with an application produced by someone else. In the modern world, APIs enable an enormous number of functions, from displaying weather information on a website to authorizing online transaction payments to allowing you to log in to an account or app using social media credentials.
What should you look for in an orchestration tool?
When selecting an orchestration tool, you should look for one that addresses the key issues you are trying to solve, integrates with your existing technology stack and will scale to meet future requirements.
Identifies and prioritizes issues: Start by identifying the IT issues you need to address and which ones will provide the most benefit, while engaging key stakeholders in the process. Once you have identified the ultimate goals of your orchestration initiatives, you’ll be better able to select a tool and/or provider. Make sure you are including any requirements specific to your organization or industry (e.g. do you need to be able to provide an audit trail?)
Integrates with existing technology: Ensure that whatever tool you select will work with your existing technology stack. Your legacy systems may or may not be able to interact successfully with a modern orchestration solution, so working with a vendor or consultant will help you to ensure interoperability.
Handles growing data needs: Make a realistic assessment of how rapidly your data needs are likely to grow. Base that decision as much as possible on historical data as well as future predictions. Keep in mind that the volume of data your orchestration platform will be required to handle is only going to increase.
Fits your business needs: Select the solution based on the tasks you need most. IT orchestration software can be used to provide a variety of functions and services, including:
- Cloud provisioning
- Configuration management
- Application deployment
- Intra-service orchestration
Other orchestration packages are aimed specifically at supporting business services or applications through application workflow orchestration, including financial operations such as credit approval and billing.
Orchestration can also be used to build software applications. Packages that focus on the continuous delivery and continuous integration of software feature a multitude of plug-ins, allowing the orchestration tool to automate most software-delivery technology.
What are some orchestration best practices?
IT orchestration is, by its nature, a complex process that touches multiple areas of your IT operations. Obviously it’s important to make sure, especially when getting started with orchestration, that you’re considering all the various aspects of the process and doing your best to ensure they work together to achieve a common goal. To that end, here are some best practices for IT orchestration.
Orchestrate to meet a defined business need: It’s important and valuable to plan your orchestration framework around activities that will provide a visible and measurable business value. If possible, start by solving a problem that everyone in your organization agrees needs solving.
Consider the human impact: The goal of orchestration is to automate tasks that can be done faster and more effectively by machines than by humans. Look for repetitive, error-prone tasks that are better accomplished by a machine to improve the efficiency of your operations as well as free your IT team to work more creatively.
Target time savings: In the same way that orchestrating repetitive functions frees up your team for more creative and productive tasks, it will also allow those tasks to be accomplished faster. One of the best ways to prove the effectiveness of your orchestration efforts is to show how much faster they can perform complex tasks and deliver value.
Over-deliver rather than over-promise: Your orchestration efforts will most likely bring significant value, but that value may not be realized immediately. Be sure to set realistic expectations about when and how much ramp-up time you’ll need to optimize your orchestration efforts.
Bring benefits to other teams: Orchestration can provide significant benefits outside just the IT department. In a DevOps environment, orchestration — including when deployed alongside machine learning — can help meet the goals of continuous delivery. When you’re choosing stakeholders, try to get a good cross section of teams outside of your own that will benefit from orchestration.
Orchestration best practices will help set your team and business up for success.
Everything we have come to know and value about automation applies to orchestration. In a world where we are constantly interacting with software applications interacting with other applications, making API calls, sharing vital information and otherwise operating at lightning speed, orchestration is essential to ensuring a positive end-user experience.
As applications move increasingly toward the cloud and containers, orchestration will become even more important, bringing together inputs from more sources to provide sophisticated and beneficial applications. Like automation, IT orchestration’s benefits are clear and the path to achieving them is well delineated. Orchestration will continue to be a key driver of digital transformation, with more and more of its features, functions and benefits integrated into the software applications that enterprises use every day.
