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What is cloud orchestration and how is it different from cloud automation? Today both small and big business units want to include cloud computing in their IT infrastructure. This is because cloud computing helps them minimize capital costs and operational expenses.

• By Naveen Joshi • 8:40 am

cloud-orchestration-automation

What is cloud orchestration?

Cloud computing handles a prodigious amount of data and processes across multiple systems. This heterogeneity makes manageability and coherence a major challenge in cloud computing. The solution to this challenge lies in implementing a tool or a product that can manage these interconnections and interactions among cloud connected units. We call this solution, cloud orchestration.

Cloud orchestration is one of those ambiguous concepts in cloud computing, that have multiple definitions to them. However, in a nutshell, we can say that cloud orchestration involves the end-to-end automation and coordination of multiple processes to deliver a desired service to its clients.

cloud-orchestration
source: www.saltstack.com

How is cloud orchestration different from cloud automation?

More often than not, cloud orchestration is used interchangeably with cloud automation. Therefore, in order to get a clear and pellucid understanding of what cloud orchestration is, we need to highlight how it’s different from cloud automation. Here’s how:

Parameters

Cloud automation

Cloud orchestration

No.
of tasks involved

It
involves a single task

It
is concerned with combining multiple such tasks into workflows

Pre-requisites
for performance

Automated
tasks must be performed in a definite sequence, under strict security
guidelines, be granted permissions etc.

Orchestration
ensures the performance of each of the automated tasks in a definite order
w.r.t one another, within a workflow

Error-proneness

Cloud
automation involves huge amount of manual coding by an engineer, which
implies fat fingering the commands. The problem arising in such situations is
that the fear of error looms large

Cloud
orchestration helps evade error-proneness by using optimizing the amount of
coding required. This it does by using the automated tasks as building
blocks, that can be reused, instead of redundant coding.

Resource
utilization

Automated
tasks exist as standalone entities, thus employing resources independently.
This leads to resource wastefulness.

Cloud
orchestration enumerates the resources, IAM roles, instance types, etc. to
help save time and deliver more accurate results

Example

Launching
a web server, configuring a web server

Combining
such automated tasks into a single workflow to meet client requests

Cloud orchestration focuses on process optimization. One of the simplest ways to do so is to remove the repetitive steps to eliminate redundancy. It identifies the automated tasks that make up a process, and ensures their reusability across operations. Orchestration, therefore, takes advantage of the building blocks (read as automated tasks) by reusing them.

Well-orchestrated processes help in the creation of templates that meet developer requirements. This helps lower the IT cost and avoid any mismatch between system and development teams’ approach.

Tools like VMware’s vRealize and AWS CloudFormations can be used to create such templates.

So here’s the key takeaway – cloud automation codifies tasks, cloud orchestration codifies processes. Both offer their individual benefits. Their combination, however, reflects the collaboration between development and operations. This collaboration eventually leads to a more robust cloud computing infrastructure.

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