Cloud orchestration - definition & overview

Cloud orchestration is a relatively new category of software tools designed to help IT organizations manage interconnections and interactions between disparate systems in increasingly complex cloud environments.

Enterprise organizations increasingly rely on cloud-based infrastructure, platforms, and applications to deliver critical capabilities and services to the organization and its customers. Cloud computing helps IT organizations operate more efficiently, reducing their up-front capital costs while providing flexible capacity for data storage, processing, and other functions.

Effective management of cloud-based resources is a growing challenge for enterprise IT as organizations migrate existing applications to the cloud and develop new capabilities that depend on cloud-based infrastructure. Cloud computing systems deal with huge amounts of data across multiple cloud environments, making it difficult to establish and maintain coherent processes that depend on increasingly disparate systems. As a result, IT organizations have turned to a new type of cloud technology designed to facilitate the management of cloud-based infrastructure: cloud orchestration.

Today, the IaaS cloud service model includes virtualization services that help streamline and automate cloud management processes that were previously done manually. Cloud service providers ensure that IT organizations can access secure, connected storage and computing power when needed, and they can configure virtual machines to deploy applications instead of waiting for approval on costly hardware purchases.

Cloud orchestration tools take full advantage of the capabilities of IaaS service providers to achieve a fully automated deployment process, eliminating the need for time-consuming manual processes that characterized IT deployments in the past.

With cloud orchestration tools, IT organizations can streamline the allocation of resources, coordinate the distribution of workloads between cloud-based resources and organize the deployment of a service on multiple servers or cloud environments.

Cloud orchestration and cloud automation are both technologies that help IT organizations and software developers automate repetitive processes in the cloud. But while cloud orchestration and cloud automation are closely related, there are a few key differences.

Cloud automation is a subset of cloud orchestration. When we talk about cloud automation, we're looking at a single task and asking, "How can we automate this task?" Cloud automation tools can automate singular processes effectively, like spinning up a batch of virtual machines with dedicated storage or deploying applications to the cloud with a specified configuration.

Cloud orchestration introduces and enforces a process flow for automated activities. It allows IT operators to take a set of automated processes and combine them into a specified workflow that fully automates service delivery, from the initial request to completion. Cloud orchestration is all about process control. It uses automated tasks as building blocks to coordinate more complex processes involving multiple resources across cloud environments to meet client requests.

Cloud orchestration tools combine other automated tasks into a workflow that delivers a service according to customer requests. These automated tasks include the provisioning and deployment of servers, virtual machines, storage space, and other computing resources. Orchestration tools can also integrate security and permissions checks. The ability to effectively orchestrate automated tasks on the cloud delivers numerous benefits for IT organizations:

Increased operational efficiency

Cloud orchestration simplifies the management of repetitive tasks through automation. IT organizations can configure and optimize automated tasks, then use those tasks as building blocks to create customized end-to-end process automation. This makes it easier to effectively coordinate physical and virtual resources, scale infrastructure according to requirements, manage security and authorization requirements and numerous other aspects of cloud management. IT organizations save huge amounts of time and money by leveraging cloud orchestration tools to reduce their need to perform manual processes.

Supporting DevOps initiatives

Software development teams striving for continuous deployment and working in cloud-based environments can benefit significantly from cloud orchestration software tools that help automate the deployment process. The ability to automate server provisioning, network and server configurations, firewalls and application testing and monitoring in production help developers focus on their most valuable activity: designing and delivering frequent updates to meet consumer and business needs.

Enhanced security and visibility

One of the leading causes of cloud security breaches occurs when IT operators make simple network configuration errors that expose sensitive data. Cloud orchestration makes it easy for IT organizations to leverage their resources for continuous vulnerability scans, compliance testing, and configuration validation. Implementing standardized configurations and reusing them as building blocks of other processes helps avoid configuration errors in a set-up that can cause data breaches.

Sumo Logic offers specialized applications for monitoring your cloud orchestration software tools, including the Kubernetes Control Plane and the VMware cloud computing virtualization platform. With Sumo Logic, you can easily aggregate logs across your cloud environments and achieve full monitoring and visibility of metrics and events on the network.