The benefits of cloud orchestration

Today's data centre is adapting to become a technological hub that hosts more and more new types of cloud technologies. The benefits of working with cloud computing are endless, but cloud computing has also come hand-in-hand with new levels of complexity.

Richard Vester, Director of Cloud Services at EOH, says cloud is not just about the addition of applications, servers and resources, but about what is currently being done with cloud, and what potential the cloud offers from a true business perspective. In addition, he says the plethora of devices that are hitting the enterprise ecosystem are making cloud interactions more complex. "This is where cloud orchestration can help organisations to achieve seamless integration of business processes that span multiple disparate applications, clouds and devices."

A key requirement of the cloud is that the majority of commodity IT activities in the company data centre need to be automated, or translated into a workflow, and then these separate workflows must be strung together to form a series of events that delivers an actual benefit to the company. As companies move to the cloud they need to aggregate capabilities for the cloud to work effectively, which will mean the automation of storage, network, performance and provisioning, he explains.

"Most of these things have been handled by separate solutions that have been added on as per the company's requirements over time. However, the management of assorted environments with different systems can be tricky to manage, and automation won't necessarily solve the problem."

Cloud orchestration is really needed when the different aspects of cloud management are united, he adds. "The value to the business at this stage of cloud is simplifying the actual management of the automation, which can be an onerous task once you take into account the multiple resource usage, scalability, availability, performance and suchlike, all based on what the business needs from the cloud, with the end aim of delivering services more quickly."

He says what orchestration does is merge all the pieces so they can be managed more easily, to facilitate a seamless and quick service delivery. "Think of orchestration as a combination of integration, automation and best practices."

Ultimately, he says, cloud orchestration is there to help companies maximise their cloud investments, as it helps to optimise a huge range of different workloads. "Over and above improved service delivery, cloud orchestration can help save costs, as less labour is needed when no manual intervention is required."

A good cloud orchestration tool goes beyond saving time and costs though, he says. "It will help to integrate cloud capabilities across a range of environments and infrastructures to make service deployment more simple, automated and optimised, and will greatly lower the need for physical interventions."

It also offers automated high-scale provisioning and de-provisioning of resources with policy-based tools to manage the possible sprawl of virtual machines, by automatically taking back resources. It will also help to integrate workflows across the various technology silos to boost collaboration and ensure delays are fewer and further between, Vester points out.

"At the end of the day, when a company is looking to move its applications to the cloud, simply automating the configuration and provisioning is not enough. They need to have a handle on what is going on with their apps at all times in order to reduce costs and boost agility. It's not only about deployment automation, but management of the cloud itself. This is where cloud orchestration matters. It helps to run post-deployment through management capabilities."