What is cloud orchestration?

The advent of the cloud has provided companies with a reliable, effective solution to delivering essential capabilities and services to their customers, at scale. As such, the cloud itself has become an intrinsic part of modern business. Cloud computing gives organisations the resources they need to improve operational efficiency, cut up-front costs and increase data and processing flexibility.

However, as the need for cloud resources increases, so does the need for effective cloud-resource management. With massive amounts of data spread throughout multiple cloud environments, establishing and maintaining coherent processes becomes a difficult prospect. To meet these rising challenges, companies are benefiting from new advances in cloud technology created to provide cloud-infrastructure management solutions. This technology is known as cloud orchestration.

Cloud orchestration works with the three primary delivery models for cloud services:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model where a provider makes an application available to a customer using a web-based interface. There are terms of service agreements that allow the customer to use the application, but they have no control over how the application is configured.

In a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, the provider is responsible for storage, systems, operating, servers, networks and capabilities that are needed to host a customer’s application. It typically works as a code execution platform using a pay-as-you-go model.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a model in which service providers are in charge of network hardware, storage and servers for a customer.

As an end-to-end automation solution for service deployment in the cloud, cloud orchestration helps to streamline and optimise cloud-based processes. These capabilities bring a number of advantages to modern organisations.

Cloud orchestration reduces manual and repetitive tasks that can be automated away. IT teams are able to configure automated tasks, and use those tasks to build customised end-to-end processes. This eases the virtual and physical resources coordination, allows businesses to scale infrastructure according to requirements, and manage security and authorisation. This saves both time and money, and gives teams what they need to operate more efficiently.

There are significant benefits for software development teams that are working for continuous deployment, and who operate in cloud-based environments. Using effective cloud orchestration to automate monitoring, provisioning, configuring, testing and more, developers are able to focus more of their attention on delivering applications and updates.

IT operators may sometimes make simple network configuration errors. Unfortunately, these simple errors are some of the leading causes of cloud security breaches. Cloud orchestration eases the process for IT organisations to leverage their resources and perform vulnerability scans, compliance testing and configuration validation, increasing security and visibility in the process.

Cloud Provisioning and Governance provisions on-demand cloud services, accelerating service delivery while providing consistent, nonintrusive governance guardrails that prevent uncontrolled cloud spend. It directly leverages native cloud provisioning capabilities.

Cloud Centres of Excellence need the ability to create a catalogue of standardised cloud services. DevOps and other users simply select the cloud service they want, enter configuration parameters and submit their request. Cloud Centres of Excellence should have a consistent, secure and auditable way of ordering services across multiple clouds, delivering effective governance while simplifying and accelerating provisioning for users.

Cloud Centres of Excellence need role-based permissions and policies for your users, creating non-intrusive guardrails that are only triggered when there is an exception condition. Policy examples include storage and CPU quotas, allowed cloud service types, naming conventions, workload placement, resource sizing limits, tagging policies and more. This enables the management approvals for policy exceptions while instantly fulfilling compliant requests. It is also important to be able to automatically deprovision cloud resources—reducing cloud sprawl and stranded cloud assets.

Managing all cloud resources and associated governance from a single portal helps to create new cloud services, manage existing cloud services, track approvals and see associated changes and incidents for cloud resources. A single portal with quota utilisation information, creates situational awareness and encourages users to release cloud resources they are no longer required.

A dedicated Cloud Administration Portal, providing a single pane of glass where IT managers can govern their cloud resources and deployment policies across multiple cloud vendors.

The concept of cloud orchestration is more than just a set of ideals. Today, businesses enjoy a range of available tools and solutions. These include the following:

Cloud services are essentially software designed to promote easy, effective cloud management for businesses. These services offer security and compliance, and help organisations better orchestrate their processes within the cloud.

Providing automation and release management of applications across different application lifecycles, continuous deployment uses automated testing to ensure stability before pushing autonomous deployment to production environments.

Development solutions help unify development and operations for faster innovation and transformation.

Identifying redundancies and waste within new and established processes, enterprise architecture driving transformation while increasing operational efficiency.

API management software administers the lifecycle of apps, integrations and APIs within SOA and heterogeneous environments.