Orchestration Basics

Orchestration

Orchestration is an integrated system for automated EMS system, configuration management, patch management, cloud management and coordination of computer systems, applications, Security management and services. Orchestration helps IT system to manage complex tasks and workflows easily. So, it suits for large scale network or virtual environment. The orchestration differs from automation. 

Orchestration layer also provides Role-based policy management, administration, configure and enforce role based policies. It helps in automated creation of virtual and physical instances and assignment of virtual infrastructure through appropriate tooling to support end-to-end automated provisioning and bare metal provisioning.

Cloud orchestration can be used to provision or deploy resources such as servers, assign or increase storage capacity, create virtual machines and manage networking among other tasks.

In IT Orchestration tool, it ranges from simple script-based app deployment tool to more specialized offerings like Kubernetes’ container orchestration solution. In the past few years, these containers have dramatically transformed the way software organizations build, ship, and maintain their applications.

 The key benefits of orchestration 

• Limited downtime or system outage
• Speed and accuracy in operation
• It can save developer time
• It has reduced errors
• Increased productivity
• Reduced IT cost
• Centralized policy management
• Auto scaling of resources

Example of some orchestration tools as; Rancher, Kubernetes, Meshosphere, Marathon, Nomad, Docker swarm, Minikube, Cloudfy, AZK, AKS, GKE. Many tools come as open source also. 

Kubernetes

The most popular orchestration tool is Kubernetes. It is an open source platform and designed by Google. It can help in automate deployment, containerized workload and services.

Some Key features of Kubernetes

• It is self healing
• Configuration management
• Storage orchestration
• Service discovery
• Load balancing

OpenShift

Similarly, OpenShift is made on the top of Kubernetes with community version as well as enterprise edition by Red Hat. It also offers container management and orchestration. It comes as in below layer;

• Red Hat Open Shift Kubernetes Engine
• Red Hat Open Shift Container Platform
• Red Hat Open Shift Platform Plus

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is based on Docker-formatted Linux containers, Kubernetes orchestration, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is available at AWS cloud platform.

So this is for basic understanding for orchestration. Refer further reads for in depth knowledge. 

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-DR