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Understanding Cloud Orchestration

Mohammed NaserMohammed Naser

Cloud orchestration refers to using programming techniques to manage the interconnections and interactions between workloads in a public and private cloud infrastructure. It's about linking automated tasks into a seamless workflow to achieve an objective, overseeing permissions and enforcing rules.

Cloud Orchestration refers to using programming techniques to manage the interconnections and interactions between workloads in a public and private cloud infrastructure. It's about linking automated tasks into a seamless workflow to achieve an objective, overseeing permissions and enforcing rules.

Orchestration is typically used to provide, deploy, or start servers, acquire and allocate storage capacity, network, create virtual machines, and access specific software within the cloud services framework. These operations are based on three main, closely related attributes:

  • Orchestration of services
  • Workloads
  • Resources An orchestration platform can also provide authorization controls to ensure security and compliance.

Cloud orchestration technology must work with independent systems. It is not uncommon to implement a global cloud deployment in different geographies and with different vendors. Besides, many users of this technology are running public and private cloud deployments.

Cloud Orchestration and Automation

Automation can be better understood as a subset of orchestration, which means that orchestration coordinates many automated activities. Automation aims to make a task quickly reproducible with minimal operator intervention, while orchestration applies to all functions.

Because the cloud components are wildly disparate, orchestration brings together high availability, scalability, disaster recovery, dependency management, and many other tasks and attributes into a single process that saves money and manpower. This technology is accompanied by the visibility of resources and strategies that simple cloud automation cannot. For example, an enterprise can regulate its capacity through predefined resource models to deploy applications and control who requests which resources.

Benefits of a Cloud Orchestration Platform

Cloud orchestration interests many IT departments and DevOps enthusiasts because it can speed up service delivery and reduce costs. Orchestration tools automate the management, coordination and organization of complex IT systems, services and middleware. In addition to saving staff time, orchestration eliminates the risk of error associated with provisioning, provisioning, or other cloud processes. It supports cloud resource delivery to customers and users, including a self-service model that allows users to request resources without IT intervention.

Orchestration software helps IT departments standardize models and implement security practices. They also prevent the proliferation of VMs by providing better visibility and control over cloud resources and, implicitly, over costs. The orchestration platform oversees the interactions between many disparate elements of the application stack, facilitating communication and connections between a workload and other applications and users and ensuring that links are appropriately configured and maintained. Products of this type typically include a web portal, which allows orchestration to be managed from a single console.

A centralized orchestration platform allows administrators to review and improve automation scripts.

In leading-edge enterprises, developers and business staff can use self-service cloud orchestration software to deploy resources. In contrast, administrators will use it to track dependencies on the various IT offerings on which the cloud is based.

Cloud Orchestration Providers

Many vendors offer cloud orchestration products. DevOps teams also have various methods to implement orchestration through automation and management tools tailored to their processes and methodologies.

Before evaluating the orchestration products, it is recommended that the administrator draw a diagram of the workflows of the applications concerned. This step will allow him to visualize the complexity of each application's internal workflows and the frequency with which the various components transmit information. Thus, he can choose the type of product offering optimal workflows and meet the company's needs with the best value for money.

In general, cloud orchestration software or tools work similarly in public, private, and hybrid clouds, but depending on the intended use case, the characteristics of either will be more suitable. The product also includes an operations module, useful for planning, management and sizing. Finally, it offers a component for managing and analyzing logs in real-time and automated functions for calculating costs, monitoring use, and pricing services.

VEXXHOST Cloud with Orchestration by Heat

VEXXHOST uses a multitude of OpenStack services including Heat, to deploy clouds for various user scenarios, allowing teams to get started with ease. At VEXXHOST, we help companies with their digital transformation by providing enterprise-grade OpenStack-based cloud solutions, including dedicated and highly secure private cloud environments.

Speaking of private clouds, you can now run on a fully agile and customized cloud from VEXXHOST, with no licensing fees and smooth 2-week migration. In fact, we're ready to put our money where our mouth is. We're so confident in being able to save you at least 20% or more on your current cloud infrastructure expenditure that if proven wrong- we'll give you $1,000 credit to our public cloud.

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