In the present times, hardly there will be any organization staying away from cloud computing. Being among the most pivotal organizational technologies, it has become essential for the majority of enterprises as it not only aids in reducing everyday expenses but provides excellent tools and applications for exponential working and growth.
Public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions are the three major types of clouds used by organizations. Hybrid cloud is the most preferred by growing enterprises as it is a perfect blend of public as well as a private cloud. However, the usage of multiple cloud types simultaneously could be complex for organizations. This is the part where cloud orchestration comes into play. It manages the workloads across multiple cloud solutions. This article elaborates all about cloud orchestration including its pros, cons, significance for an organization, and its difference with cloud automation.
Cloud orchestration is the process to handle several workloads at once through automation on various clouds to make the workflow single. In some cases, it integrates manual and automated testing to run tasks. Its major functionality is to focus on the interconnection within different cloud environments and maintain a steady functionality.
As the number of cloud applications rises in an organization, the need to keep synchronization within them goes up. Cloud orchestration is the factor that will keep all the applications in line with each other for the most effective outcome. There are three models that are mainly used for cloud services and orchestration.
PaaS offers the hardware, software, and platform to the desired team to create applications for the organizations. Windows Azure and Google App Engine are the biggest examples of PaaS.
SaaS is one of the commonest types of cloud service where the provider creates software on the web and the user can access the same after paying the subscription. Microsoft Office, and Adobe Acrobat as some of the SaaS products.
IaaS works at a much larger scale than the aforementioned two as the users get a cloud-based infrastructure with features like data storage through virtualization, virtual space, and other networking features. However, the user has to update security nodes manually upon every version release.
Cloud orchestration comes with multiple benefits for an organization like maintaining a robust growth and cloud ecosystem. Below are some additional pros of this technology for an organization.
Being able to see everything in one place is an excellent feature that gives an overall view of the resources. Cloud orchestration comes with a user-friendly dashboard that ensures visibility of all the cloud resources. Furthermore, it comes with essential tools that can review and modify virtual machine instances automatically, reducing the additional manual efforts. By providing centralized management of security, policies, and accessibility, cloud orchestration offers excellent control on the cloud.
There is no denying the fact that even professional and knowledgeable humans can make mistakes. However, a machine is not capable of making such mistakes as they are programmed to perform effectively. As orchestration automates easy and uncomplicated operations, it can solve several problems in cloud domains. With lesser human intervention, the probability of errors is minimized and work efficiency can be increased as well.
Cloud automation is a part of cloud orchestration. Orchestration works as the integrator of automation, and automation manages the individual tasks, it blends such tasks to a better workflow. In addition, orchestration can automate storage, database, servers, and networks, making management and optimization uncomplicated.
For an organization, financial management is necessary to plan out future growth opportunities. Cloud orchestration offers automated metering that leads to the effective usage of resources. This automation can reduce the overall cost of investments and increase savings in the long run.
Cloud orchestration automates deployment, server, and firewall configurations. As DevOps does not need to focus on these factors anymore, they can put their focus on tasks like the development and designing of products.
Cloud orchestration is not just about benefits but also has some limitations which should be considered before using this tech. Here are some of the limitations that you may face.
To get cloud orchestration, it is necessary to deploy complex clusters which come with several dependencies. Users have to keep track of them and understand their significance before so that they can be optimized to meet the requirements.
Much like other cloud technologies, cloud orchestration requires special skills to perform. Organizations opting to adapt to this tech may need to hire experts which could increase the cost. Moreover, some of the orchestration tools are not optimized for extra security which is why specialists need to be hired to manage the risks and optimize the tools.
While using a hybrid cloud setup, it is essential to have a stable and high-speed internet connection between the public and private cloud for the best results. Though it might not be a major challenge for some, there are certain places where getting blazingly fast internet is a challenge.
It is often said that cloud automation is a subset of cloud orchestration. However, there are several dissimilarities between the two that sets them apart.
Cloud automation’s primary task is to automate certain tasks. With that in mind, it only utilizes resources to automate tasks. On the other hand, cloud orchestration has to accomplish tasks like identity and access management roles, type of instances, and many others. It uses the attained resources to perform these tasks with accurate results without compromising the usage time. When it comes to efficiency, cloud orchestration is more efficient in utilizing resources as compared to automation.
Both cloud automation and cloud orchestration utilize resources for handling workload based on cloud computing, but their working nature is entirely different from each other. When it comes to cloud automation, it can set up single tasks including web server configuration and launch, and termination of service, among others. The major difference between these two is that cloud orchestration can automate several tasks simultaneously including arrangement, coordination, and management of systems for a workforce at scale.
The automation process includes an enormous amount of coding performed under a defined sequence. Moreover, the policies and security guidelines in automation are highly rigid. In the case of cloud orchestration, its focus is to ensure the comprehensive performance of the ongoing automated tasks in the defined order within the workflow. Cloud orchestration optimizes coding, helping in avoiding major errors in the code.
As cloud computing emerges within organizations, understanding the significance of technologies is essential. Considering that fact, below explained is the importance of cloud orchestration for an organization.
With the facility to pick the application workload and different types of virtual machines as per the user’s requirements, cloud orchestration’s setup makes it uncomplicated to approve cloud resources, making it a self-service tech. The self-service feature makes cloud orchestration a significant part of upcoming data infrastructure which the majority of the organizations are adopting.
A hybrid cloud is a cloud service that uses both private as well as public clouds for the same goal. In other words, a hybrid cloud is a perfect blend of public and private cloud services that communicates between each service with the help of software. With hybrid cloud orchestration, organizations can share workload within the cloud solutions with exponential flexibility.
Even though multi-cloud also uses private and public clouds. However, the major cloud providers of both these types are different. The reason why multi-cloud are used is to ensure optimum results from the cloud servers. The different providers could mean that the cloud may or may not be equal in delivering performance. Multi-cloud orchestration aids in working with different cloud solutions and fulfilling the requirements effectively.
Microsoft Azure is among the biggest names in cloud computing. Azure Automation is a cloud-based automation service offering management of Azure and non-Azure environments. Update management, automation, and configuration are the parts of Azure management that aids in minimizing errors and deployment time. Apart from that, it helps in optimizing cloud resources and manages cloud spending as well.
IBM is a leading name in cloud orchestration and their self-service portal assists in managing cloud services. This platform can be used for the automation of cloud services through tools. Moreover, it is customizable and comes with automated provision. With this platform, users can integrate, configure, deploy, and add service management. In addition, the inbuilt tools allow the users to monitor, secure, backup and manage the applications.
Morpheus is mainly a multi-cloud orchestration platform that provides users with analytic features so that they can attain in-depth detail on their cloud spending. The aim of this platform is to let developers connect with self-service infra and help in comparing the costs of multiple cloud resources. This platform allows the building of multi-cloud structures, service catalogs, and many others.
AppFormix is an orchestration and cloud operations management platform offering excellent visibility for a multi-cloud environment. Features like conversion of raw data to easy-to-read format, tracking programs working on the public cloud, and setting up business outcomes are part of AppFormix. Furthermore, it helps in detecting problems in the cloud and taking the right measures before the issue can become hefty for the organization.
Creating a working orchestration in an enterprise is an effective yet challenging process. Understanding these challenges will aid in the preparation and smooth implementation of cloud orchestration.
No matter what cloud technology is being implemented in an organization, personnel needs to be trained to make it work to its full capabilities. As every cloud platform comes with different orchestration capabilities, the operations team needs to learn using the multiple tools in this complex environment. Every tool requires experience and unique skills to be learned, lack of investment in training can be a major loss in the coming future.
Without a doubt, every newly implemented technology comes with several benefits. However, the organization needs to take all the measures to help the personnel in dealing with the changes in the process and working models. Sometimes, enterprises pay little to no attention to managing the change due to which people may keep on working the same way they used before the implementation of the new tech. The same is a big challenge while implementing cloud orchestration which is why providing training on programming and adopting the DevOps approach is effective to change to a working model.
Enterprises implement new technologies to achieve certain goals; be it long-term or short-term. Before its implementation, having a clear idea of what should be achieved in a measurable value will assist in determining whether implanting this will be effective or not. Many organizations do not think the process through due to which they are unable to attain the potential capabilities of cloud orchestration. Not looking at the transformative benefits and just the budgeting part will never help in attaining the best results. Rather, analyzing these benefits and goals should be done before and throughout the usage of cloud orchestration.
The biggest perk of implementing cloud orchestration is increasing the speed, experience, and resiliency of IT while reducing overall costs. Sometimes, it may seem like orchestration is not doing much in terms of functionality and its investment may seem to provide not a greater result. Considering that fact, attaining and managing funds can be highly challenging for the team.
As the usage of the cloud in organizations rises, the demand for cloud orchestration increases as well. With benefits like reduction in IT costs, better connections, and effective workflow, organizations have started to put more trust in orchestration. Orchestration can aid in managing private, public, and hybrid clouds and perform automated tasks effectively, making it a useful technology in the future.
