Cloud Orchestration
Sign UpWhat is Orchestration?
Orchestration, as it is often referred to in IT, as an automated arrangement, coordination, and management of computer systems, and services. Cloud Orchestration is the exact same thing, deploying and managing platforms and (cloud-native) applications on cloud infrastructure. It involves procedural, or script-based tools which are most commonly a simple set of commands used to automatically deploy, configure, and manage networks, servers, and applications. This way you are able to create and reproduce the exact same platform or application over and over again. You can also do this across multiple cloud provider using one single orchestration tool.
What are the advantages of Cloud Orchestration?
Orchestration or automating the deployment and management of cloud infrastructure reduces the number of repetitive tasks and human involvement. Therefore, reducing the amount of time it takes to fulfill those tasks. For example, deploying a new instance or server and patching them with the latest security patches. Cloud orchestration eliminates potential errors introduced by human error when doing things by hand during provisioning, configuration or management tasks. By excluding human errors orchestration helps you to set a better maintainable security standard across your entire cloud platform. Because every instance or group of instances is installed and provided with the same security measures and patches in exactly the same way.
To summon the advantages of cloud orchestration:
Saving time and decreasing IT costs by automation
Increasing and improving productivity
Standardizing (security) processes across the entire platform
What is the best Cloud Orchestration tool?
There is a wide variety of cloud orchestration tools available for deploying and managing cloud infrastructure. So how do you know which one is right for you and your business? Some orchestration tools require a client to be installed on the targeted hosts while others only talk to the APIs. Unfortunately, there is not a one size fits all solution to this and I would recommend to try out and test several tools. But to help you out we have our favorite tools sorted in two categories, Infra-as-code and Deployment & management tools.
Infrastructure-as-code
Ansible
Ansible is a quick way to start automating. Ansible is a simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application- and continuous deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
More about AnsibleAnsible tutorials:
Terraform
Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.
Terraform tutorials:
Helm
Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications. Helm Charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application.
Puppet
Enforce, secure, and deliver infrastructure whether hybrid or cloud-native from one platform.
SaltStack
Salt is Python-based, open-source software for event-driven IT automation, remote task execution, and configuration management.
More about SaltStackSaltStack tutorials:
Chef
Chef aims to solve automation across the enterprise IT estate, and across functional roles, to provide an environment where a business can build, deploy, and manage any software, anywhere.
Deployment & management tools
Kubernetes
Kubernetes makes the management of containerized workloads and services easy for both one-time configurations and automation.
Kubernetes tutorials:
Juju
Juju is an open-source application modeling tool that allows you to deploy, configure, scale and operate cloud infrastructures quickly and efficiently on public clouds
Docker Swarm
Docker Engine introduces swarm mode that enables you to create a cluster of one or more Docker Engines called a swarm. A swarm consists of one or more nodes: physical or virtual machines running Docker Engine in swarm mode.
Mesos
Apache Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.
Rancher
Rancher is a complete software stack for teams adopting containers. It addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.
DC/OS
DC/OS (the Distributed Cloud Operating System) is an open-source, distributed operating system. DC/OS manages multiple machines in the cloud or on-premises from a single interface; deploys containers, distributed services, and legacy applications into those machines; and provides networking, service discovery and resource management to keep the services running and communicating with each other.
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