Cloud Orchestration: Why It Matters in 2024
As much as 87% of enterprises embrace a multi-cloud approach. While this enables flexibility and convenience, it also creates confusion and complexity when managing tasks across multiple platforms.
As companies grow, point solutions organically crop up to solve problems where they arise, eventually creating siloes that require individual attention and maintenance. This slows processes and frustrates fast IT.
Cloud orchestration tools bridge these gaps, enabling organizations to control workflows, processes, and automated tasks across multiple cloud and on-premises platforms simultaneously. As these tools grow in popularity, Gartner has highlighted this trend, noting the use of Service Orchestration and Automation Tools (SOAPs) in their recently updated Market Guide. They state,
“Service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAPs) enable I&O leaders to design and implement business services through a combination of workflow orchestration, workload automation, and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure.”
As companies grapple with the intrinsic management challenges of those hybrid digital infrastructures, cloud orchestration emerges as one of the top trending solutions to reduce redundancy, cut complexity, and increase efficiency in cross-platform workflow management.
What is Cloud Orchestration, Exactly?
Cloud orchestration is the centralized management of multiple public and private cloud workloads. As stated in TechTarget, “It connects automated tasks into a cohesive workflow to accomplish a goal, with permissions oversight and policy enforcement.”
Cloud orchestration tools can be used to streamline tasks, including:
- Provisioning and deploying servers
- Managing networking
- Assigning storage capacity
- Creating virtual machines
- Enabling access to specific cloud software
- Integrating permission checks for security and compliance
- And more
They can also provide more visibility into internal resources than cloud automation tools alone. Which brings us to our next point.
What’s the Difference Between Cloud Automation and Cloud Orchestration?
Cloud orchestration naturally follows well-implemented cloud automation, bringing isolated tasks together under one managed workflow. A company early on in its cloud migration journey will want to start with basic cloud automation, streamlining identified tasks and reducing the inefficiencies and errors of manual processes. As enterprises mature and begin to diversify among multiple cloud providers, cloud orchestration becomes more important as a strategy. This will enable them to not only keep track of cross-platform demands, but smoothly scale management as other cloud environments get added into the mix.
Cloud Automation Examples | Automate IT Processes
- Automates tasks within one tool
- Automating the termination of server instances upon task completion
- Comes before cloud orchestration
- Includes individual entities like SaaS apps, on-premises data, and devices
- Improves point solution efficiency
Cloud Orchestration Examples | Unify Control Over IT processes
- Coordinates multiple tools (eg., Chef and Ansible)
- Consolidate cloud management tools like Saltstack and Rackware
- Comes after cloud automation
- Includes platforms like SOAP, iPaaS (integration platform as a service)
- Improves ecosystem efficiency
5 Cloud Orchestration Benefits
Here are several benefits of orchestrating automated processes between multiple cloud services:
- Deploy and scale faster | With cloud orchestration, you can automate the provisioning process so your developers can get to work faster and with less downtime. For example, instead of waiting for IT to provision a new server (which can take up to weeks), your team can update a Kubernetes YAML file in minutes. When it comes to scaling, orchestration allows your team to simply update a configuration file and expand your cloud service just that fast.
- Bring down errors and risk | Cloud service providers secure some, but not all, of your cloud assets. Cloud orchestration allows you to automate those security requirements within your jurisdiction so that all subsequent servers adhere to the same set of rules automatically. Reduced human involvement means reduced mistakes.
- Enable multi-cloud deployments | A cloud-agnostic orchestration platform makes it possible to create a single configuration file that plays well with any major vendor’s cloud platform. Having the capability in place now prevents vendor locking and opens opportunities in the future.
- Raise your “bus factor” | “This project is going well, but if just two people leave, it will stall.” That’s your “bus factor” (those two people), and cloud orchestration tools increase that number so even more can possibly be switched off the project before you’re in hot water. That’s because they can copy/paste complex configuration tools and replicate them across subsequent cloud deployments, making it a “one and done” deal rather than “all hands-on deck” at all times.
- Reduce cloud hosting costs | Roughly 35% of cloud computing spending is wasted on instances that are underutilized and overoptimized. It’s important to run lean in order to cut these extra costs. Cloud orchestration enables you to right-size your resources by giving you visibility into which resources are deployed and how they need to be optimized, then allows you to easily and uniformly make those adjustments across the board.
The topic of orchestration is trending in the digital community. Adds Hugo Lu, founder of Orchestra, in a post on Medium, “[In the past ten years] we’ve seen so many different developments in the data world…but not much new in [the] Orchestration world. Which is kinda insane, because Orchestration is the most important thing [sic].” Be it information or automated processes, the principle is the same—in an era of Big Data and hyper-distributed environments, something is needed to pull it all together.
Getting Started with Cloud Orchestration
How do you know you’re ready for a cloud orchestration solution?
Consider how many cloud platforms you use. If the answer is “more than one,” you’re a candidate. Keep in mind, you may use only a couple today, but competition requires innovation, and you want to be able to scale at a moment’s notice should the business need arise. When that happens, you’ll want a cloud orchestration tool to help you do so (quickly, without increasing overhead, and without errors).
Once you have decided to move forward, you’ll want to take the following steps to prepare:
- What do you want to achieve? | Do you want to better integrate cloud services? Optimize resources? Reduce cloud costs? Decide first, then decide how you will measure success.
- Take a hard look at your environment | Look at the way you currently run your IT ecosystem. Spot any errors or inefficiencies. This is where you’ll begin.
- Find your team | Find stakeholders who share the automation and orchestration vision. These are people in any department who have felt the backlash of those inefficient and complex processes and are ready for a change.
- Begin with the end in mind | Look to the future; is what you’re building today going to sustain the scalability needs of tomorrow? It needs to.
Craft your orchestration strategy to take new technologies and integrations in stride. This is, after all, one of the biggest reasons for an early and comprehensive overhaul. Build it now, and it will last for years to come. Wait too long, and your transition will be that much harder and more disruptive in the future.
This principle is especially true in hybrid cloud orchestration. Because the hybrid cloud entails both a public and private cloud component (the public cloud is often used for load balancing or the occasional spike in traffic), orchestration is required to efficiently move workloads from one to the other with ease.
6 Key Features to Look for in a Cloud Orchestration Tool
When looking to transition to a cloud orchestration model, organizations need to bear the following in mind when looking for the right solution:
- Cross-platform job scheduling | Your solution should go beyond tasks in one cloud alone; for maximum ROI, your cloud orchestration tool must be able to coordinate workflows across disparate platforms, systems, and applications, all from a single pane of glass.
- Event-driven cloud scheduling | Even-based scheduling automatically triggers the next step when an event occurs, increasing reliability. Events can include creating or modifying a file, a status change, a calendar date, a time of day, and more.
- Self-service automation | Users outside of IT should be able to schedule their own jobs with self-service automation. That way, IT has more time, and inter-departmental collaboration becomes less burdensome.
- Monitoring | Get a graphical view of all jobs in your environment (both on-prem and cloud) when you prioritize an all-encompassing command center. This centralized view is key for a cloud orchestration solution, as you get full ecosystem visibility in real-time to help you make informed decisions fast.
- Alerting and logging | Pick a provider with logging and alerting capabilities so you can find problems before they escalate and (with the help of logging) always be ready for an audit.
- Enterprise security | Last but certainly not least, security needs to be a top consideration when looking for a cloud orchestration solution. Pick a tool with enterprise security features that protect who can access, change, and modify cloud jobs.
An Example of Cloud Orchestration at Work
Prologis, a global real estate logistics company, needed support for its foundational new data warehouse and data lake. For years, Prologis had used an enterprise job scheduler for its ETL orchestration, or the process of moving data from multiple databases to one repository. When they started to modernize, they added Snowflake, a leading data cloud company, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS), a firm that integrates multiple data exchange applications, and Denodo, a data virtualization tool.
Now, all they needed was something to bring it all together. Enter: JAMS workload automation and job scheduling software.
Here’s how it works. JAMS is serving IICS to land all the data first and simultaneously serving Denodo for the data virtualization layer, telling Denodo to make data available to users and complete its tasks. JAMS’ scheduling capabilities enable Prologis to back up data regularly and complete the backups within a predefined window, so they make it into the reports on time. Additionally, JAMS kicks off jobs within Snowflake, launching stored procedures that are tied to IICS successfully delivering data into the data lake. Upon completion, JAMS performs a check query to ensure the stored procedure works.
By implementing JAMS in strategic ways, Prologis was able to correlate three high-powered cloud services, getting the best out of all of them while coordinating them to work together, triggering automated, interdependent tasks and driving efficiency.
Why Choose JAMS for Cloud Orchestration?
Do you need the full picture? JAMS gives you a dynamic view of your entire IT ecosystem in a graphical representation.
Do you want more control? Interact with your jobs as they progress through each step of their execution lifecycle.
Do you support diverse business services? JAMS schedules jobs across disparate business technologies and in many different scripts (ERP and CRM, SQL and Python, and more).
Additionally, JAMS can help you:
- Orchestrate Workflows | Bring all your cloud-based jobs together under a single management dashboard where you can see and adjust all in one place.
- Improve Process Management | Fully control who can access, create, and modify jobs – and who cannot.
- Scale | JAMS is a scalable platform with flexible, fair licensing. Put agents on any server and in any environment to quickly adjust to demands.
- Respond Faster | JAMS sends you alerts whenever a job is in trouble, so you can fix it before it becomes a real problem.
- Get At-A-Glance Insights | Automatically generate reports to spot trends, determine growth, and track KPIs.
GIVE JAMS A TRY
JAMS orchestrates your entire workload to better help you define, manage, and monitor critical jobs.