Hi there,
everybody’s speaking about automation within IT, which I want to cover a little bit next time.
Sometimes a word orchestration can be heard in regards with automation. What it really is and why is it important? I’ll try to give my insight.
Orchestration is the collective name for the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of systems, software, and practices.
Imagine this as a “brain” put on top of your systems that is coordinating them. These systems can have multiple features and functionalities.
Orchestration is a collection of tools to combine software, hardware, and manual processes into a seamless system. These tools let you connect and automate workflows.
Going a bit more into practice, imagine you get an order to provision a virtual server. A server has to run on some hardware with hypervisor, an IP address to be assigned, operating system to be installed, firewall configured and preferably some software installed. It’s a set of tasks typically done in multiple departments. These departments usually have tools or scripts to do these tasks (hopefully) and humans do these. Orchestration is basically talking to these tools/scripts to do the job without having a human-being executing it.
Orchestration handles routine tasks, process enforcement, and reliably meet the demands of the largest enterprises. Orchestration integrates IT administrative tasks from start to finish.
Companies usually have tasks that are repeated once in a time period or every time an event occurs. This can be a reports to be prepared at the end of the month, or accounts created and permissions granted to the newcomers. And again, this can be done by orchestration either fully automated (on a specific date you get a report generated by different system) or the process can be triggered (a form filled with employees details and neccessary actions are done on the systems).
There are all kinds of different tools for orchestrating the environments. Which tools are you using and what is your experience with automation/orchestration?
Cheers!
Robot(ICT) guy