Cloud technology is the heart of business operations today. An average enterprise uses 1,427 varied cloud services approximately and the cloud is used by 60% of the companies out there to store confidential data. If you feel cloud computing is only synonymous with big companies and market players, let’s understand that around 90% of companies around the world use at least one cloud service.
As consumer behavior, market requirements, and expectations on product capabilities continue to increase, businesses are keener on resorting to cloud services to charge their applications, platforms, and tech infrastructure. They aim at cloud integrations to enable advanced functionalities, stability, service delivery, and more to deliver an optimum experience to their customers and simultaneously optimize productivity and efficiency. The best part about cloud technologies is that they allow businesses to achieve all this at cost-effective prices.
Despite these advantages and seamlessness, enterprise and companies are facing one major challenge in operating their cloud infrastructure. A lot of companies have their applications, data, servers, and more distributed across multiple cloud platforms. With every cloud being different and unique in its own ways, streamlining every cloud-based module together is one big concern businesses are experiencing today. Because of the scattered deployment and usage of varied cloud services, their processes are not as coherent as they are supposed to be, data management is not as seamless, interoperability is restricted, modules are becoming increasingly siloed and distant, and more.
To curb the rise of disparate systems and processes, companies are turning to a new tool to facilitate the management of multiple cloud-based services and get everything on the same page. This overall technology that embraces all fragmented cloud services and streamlines visions, processes, and workflows is what we call cloud orchestration.
Despite being a buzzword for a couple of years, the term cloud orchestration is gradually becoming mainstream. Knowledge on what the technology is, its purpose, and more are becoming more prominent across industries and market segments. At a time like this, where businesses are deciding to deploy cloud technologies for their requirements, we thought it was essential to shed light on cloud orchestration and how it could help businesses achieve productivity and experience seamlessness in their operations.
This article exactly explores and lists some of the most popular cloud orchestration tools you can opt for immediately once you’re done with the right up.
So, let’s get started.
What Is Cloud Orchestration?
The role of an IT team is very challenging. They are responsible for developing, deploying, and managing servers, ensuring their applications and server operations are scalable, coordinating among several cloud technologies, systems and machines, and more. With the complexity of cloud management directly associated with the complexities of an IT system, teams have it really tough to accomplish every single task we just mentioned above.
That’s where cloud orchestration comes in. It allows teams to better manage their cloud infrastructure regardless of how complex and intricate it is. With cloud orchestration tools and automation, IT teams can streamline processes and resource allocation, manage workload distribution across multiple resources, deploy servers and do more.
With this understanding, let’s also acknowledge that cloud orchestration is quite different from cloud automation. Despite being overlapping, interchangeable, and working towards similar purposes, cloud automation works on streamlining individual processes, workflows, or tasks. It is more about removing manual intervention from systems and bringing in a conveyor belt mechanism into them. On the other hand, cloud orchestration involves managing multiple automated systems across clouds, servers, and applications and coordinating among complex tasks and processes.
Advantages Of Cloud Orchestration
- Cloud orchestration paves the way for optimized organizational and operational efficiency through automated processes, delivery of tailored end-to-end solutions, and more.
- It allows IT teams to better secure their cloud servers through consistent scans of vulnerabilities, tests, compliance assessments, configuration, and more.
- The software development cycle can be immensely optimized for consistent deployment and delivery through cloud orchestration. Thanks to capabilities like automatic server provisioning, server configurations, application, and firewall testing, productivity monitoring, and more, teams can focus on what DevOps stands for - perpetual designing and delivery, updations, and meeting customer and market demands.
- Cloud orchestration minimizes the onset of errors into a system because of automated processes and zeroes to minimal human intervention.
- Businesses can scale their operations up or down easily through cloud orchestration.
A Definitive List Of The Best Cloud Orchestration Tools,
Of course, the list starts with Microsoft Azure Automation. One of the most sought cloud orchestration tools, it operates within the market player’s cloud platform and enables you to seamlessly integrate multiple management solutions. Apart from managing deployments within Azure, you can also manage deployments across multiple clouds and even on-premises infrastructure. Thanks to this, you can now conveniently roll out updates across operating systems including Linux.
Azure also supports importing configuration files, reporting and analytics files to review and retrieve IT infrastructure, tracking changes across services to uncover probable issues, and more. Azure is beyond ground-level automation and complex systems management. It is an assurance to make your systems and processes error-free at cost-effective prices.
An open-source tool, Bolt is designed for enterprises with special emphasis on cloud orchestration. Being a command-line tool, you can easily create and manage plans for your app stack across Mac, Windows, and Linux instead of manually orchestrating workflows.
With Bolt, you can even make use of already existing plans and scripts to modify or roll out updates throughout your cloud services and IT architecture without any hassles. The best part is that it supports all scripting languages.
It also paves the way for security and ensures any and all compliances are met and enforced throughout your cloud applications and services. Being an open-source tool, it has a solid community that offers airtight resources for beginners and forums and Bootcamp sessions for those who require training or formal introduction to the tool.
Specializing in delivering products and services that enable digital transformation in companies, the Multi-cloud Management solution from BMC is all about helping users manage multiple clouds in unique ways as the name suggests. With the help of features like cloud migration portals, cost estimation modules, predictive service management, and more, the solution enables you to conveniently manage your cloud systems.
Besides, you can also monitor and manage your hybrid cloud environments through BMC Multi-cloud management and assess their performance to ensure the optimum customer experience. This monitoring also helps you identify problems easily and come up with rectifications accordingly.
One of the other prominent cloud orchestration tools, Morpheus aims at helping developers switch to self-service infrastructure. Despite being only a decade old, Morpheus boasts of an incredible array of clients such as McDonald's, HSBC, and more. The USP of the solution is its analytics module that allows stakeholders to get extensive insights on their cloud spends. By breaking down expenses across diverse cloud resources and infrastructure, the tool empowers them to manage their spending better.
With Morpheus, you can develop service catalogs, intricate structures across multiple clouds, use stack visualization tools, authorize accesses to clients and users, develop workflow policies, and more. Besides, maintenance procedures can also be scheduled regularly and deployment can be paused during non-operating hours as well.
You can also integrate the tool with your development tools to manage and deploy source code, monitor your app’s performance, and more. Because it is integrated with development tools, developers can also access resources from Git and GitHub.
From the brand VMware, CloudHealth is designed for enterprises to manage hybrid cloud infrastructure. From multi-cloud visibility and reporting methodologies to analytics and personalized dashboard, CloudHealth offers a wide range of features and functionalities.
Through the dashboard, stakeholders can have an exhaustive view of resource allocation at teams and individual levels. Cost identification and monitoring are also possible, where you can uncover new trends and come up with budgeting strategies. Other customer-specific aspects like security, governance and compliance are preloaded so you can ensure there are no instances of a data breach happening that could land you into legal troubles. With VMware’s CloudHealth, you get a holistic cloud orchestration tool your business deserves.
A solid automation tool, Chef stands out by breaking down intricate cloud infrastructure into codes. Chef allows you to configure, deploy and manage your apps across your networks seamlessly. It deploys what it calls cookbooks to dictate the configuration of every node.
Chef is monolithic in nature, which means that you can use this tool to manage multiple services from a single point of interface. It is easy to install, built to be developer-friendly, and is ideal for operating system-level automation use cases.
With that said, there is a steady learning curve associated with Chef. Once this is overcome, Chef is as powerful and efficient as it gets.
Launched in the year 2012, Ansible is one of the powerful cloud orchestration tools that you can use to bring servers and services together on the same page through an array of configuration and classes techniques.
If you are associated with multiple cloud vendors and services, you can connect everyone together and have a one-avenue approach to manage them all with wrapper modules. One of the standout features of Ansible is that it is lightweight and swift with respect to deployability.
Ansible also shows flawless compatibility with Amazon Web Services. Even some of the most complex AWS environments can be easily interpreted with Ansible using its Playbooks modules. With this, cloud environments can be deployed multiple times and scaled massively across different geographical locations. Ansible is easy to set up and configure and does not come with a learning curve or the need for an agent at all.
Another open-source cloud orchestration tool, OpenStack predominantly operates as an IaaS solution. It features a web of interconnected modules that enables the controlling of networking, storage, and processing resources across data centers. Every activity or task across multiple clouds can be accomplished through a web-based dashboard, RESTful APIs, or CLI tools.
Wrapping Up
So, these were the 8 best cloud orchestration tools you could deploy to manage your cloud environments. With each offering, its own benefits and use cases, understand your operational requirements, capability standards, and other key metrics to decide which tool would be most suitable for your organization’s goals.
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