What Is Orchestration?

Orchestration is the automated coordination and management of complex workflows across multiple systems and processes. Within IT, there are various types of orchestration, such as container orchestration, workflow orchestration, infrastructure orchestration, and data pipeline orchestration. Each of these types of orchestration requires multiple systems and steps to perform tasks such as deploying a web application. You can consider orchestration as a series of logic-bound automated tasks and event-based decision-making processes. Successful orchestration is fault-resistant, scalable, testable, restartable, and easily configurable.

Automation is the act of performing repetitive tasks without human intervention. Teams use automated tools to expedite task implementation and reduce the risk of human error.

Meanwhile, orchestration refers to the process of coordinating individual tasks across multiple computer systems to serve a specific goal. While automation focuses on a single process, orchestration allows one process to trigger another in a logical flow.

For example, you can use automation for the container creation process. A container is a software package that contains an application’s code and dependencies that can run on any physical or virtual machine hosting a containerized environment. However, you’ll need to use orchestration to determine where the container should run and which metrics to monitor.

IT teams use orchestration to simplify different workflows across disparate systems. Here are some common types of orchestration in the enterprise.

Container orchestration

Container orchestration allows you to deploy containerized applications across multiple virtual machines or cloud instances. Software teams might need to deploy hundreds of containers in production, a process that can be time-consuming or difficult to perform manually. Orchestration tools connect tasks, such as infrastructure provisioning, load balancing, and self-healing, to ensure containers function optimally. Many developers use Kubernetes with cloud services to orchestrate containers. For example, StormForge uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to manage Kubernetes workloads, helping to reduce infrastructure costs by up to 40 percent. Container orchestration is sometimes known as application orchestration.

Workflow orchestration

Workflow orchestration enables IT teams to coordinate tasks across various systems.

For instance, let’s say that your team is developing a food ordering app. Separate systems validate the order, process the payment, update your inventory, send the order to the kitchen, and track the delivery. At each step in the ordering process, the orchestrated workflow operates on conditional triggers and passes data along.

For example, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) uses AWS Step Functions workflow automation to process over 800,000 driving license applications.

Infrastructure orchestration

Infrastructure orchestration provides end-to-end visibility, management, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure. Instead of provisioning web servers, data storage, services, and other cloud resources from scratch, IT teams orchestrate the entire process with pre-determined configurations, policies, and frameworks. Infrastructure orchestration uses infrastructure as code (IaC) to launch, manage, and decommission resources.

Once deployed, the orchestration tool continuously monitors infrastructure health, provides recommendations, and generates reports for respective stakeholders. Organizations often use infrastructure orchestration with process automation tools to achieve optimal results. For example, Audi uses Terraform to automate infrastructure deployment, expediting the process with AWS CloudFormation.

Data pipeline orchestration

Data pipeline orchestration enables data engineers to manage, process, and analyze data from multiple sources more efficiently. Conventionally, each data storage operates with an independent data pipeline. Data ingestion, cleaning, transformation, and analysis take place separately, which complicates data mining and business intelligence tasks. Data orchestration tools simplify data retrieval across siloed storage, such as data lakes, data warehouses, and cloud databases. Data orchestration improves data quality and reduces time-to-insight. For example, BMW uses AWS Glue to derive real-time and historical data insights from vehicle and customer telemetry data.

Other types of orchestration

There are various other types of orchestration, including security orchestration, such as AWS Security Hub, and API orchestration, to coordinate API communication between services.

Orchestration works by coordinating the logical flow of multiple tasks across systems to achieve a specific outcome. The orchestration solution hides the complexities of implementing these tasks from the end users. Once configured, the orchestrator, which is a dedicated component, ensures that each task is completed successfully before moving on to the next one. The orchestrator might schedule tasks based on their priority, assign them to designated computers, and track their progress.

Depending on the use case, orchestration might involve different activities. For example, in software development, it can involve merging branches or code, automating tests, and generating a build image. Meanwhile, in cloud computing, orchestration generally refers to streamlining infrastructure provisioning, resource allocation, workload deployment, data flow management, error handling, and other tasks.

An example is in deploying a containerized application, where the orchestration layer ensures these tasks run as expected:

• Determine the most optimal cluster node to deploy the container
• Assign compute resources and storage capacity
• Load the container image from the registry
• Run the container
• Monitor cluster health

As usage grows, the container orchestrator would rebalance workloads to ensure optimal performance. The container orchestrator prevents distributed applications from consuming resources in ways that affect overall service delivery. Container orchestration tools also integrate with security capabilities for policy enforcement, access control, and governance.

Here are the main components of an orchestration tool.

Orchestration engine

The orchestration engine is the heart of the entire orchestration workflow. It is responsible for scheduling tasks, coordinating the workflow, and ensuring processes align with the preconfigured sequence. When queuing and launching specific tasks, it considers several factors, such as rules, external events, and other prerequisites.

State management

A state machine is a software component that represents events in a logical order. When you orchestrate processes, you’re actually running through sequential steps in a state machine. Each state consists of an action that turns an input into an output based on specific business logic. You can manage these states so that they perform tasks that align with the orchestration goal. In some cases, the orchestrator engine can run multiple states in parallel and consolidate their results.

Error handling and retry logic

Orchestration platforms are built to handle errors and reduce disruption to schedule tasks. When the orchestrator detects an error, it attempts to run the task again. It might even wait for a specific duration before retrying, failing which, it’ll halt the process. Orchestrators use idempotency, which states that the same action run multiple times can only have an effect once, to make sure that retry logic always results in a reliable system state. Additionally, the orchestrator can log all events, including state errors it encountered for remediation and audit purposes.

Service coordination

Orchestration can involve integrating services from different vendors, cloud services, legacy systems, and external systems. The orchestrator facilitates data exchange, usually with application programming interfaces (APIs) between third-party systems. The orchestrator ensures consistency in data format, delivery, and rate limits, which prevents performance bottlenecks.

Orchestration technologies help organizations modernize workloads, increase productivity, and improve business outcomes. Here are some key benefits of orchestration.

Reduces operational complexity

IT teams use orchestration tools to turn complex tasks into manageable and straightforward processes. Instead of manually coordinating processes on different systems, they use an orchestrator to create workflows that connect the distributed processes. This way, they can manage larger workflows without being overwhelmed by the complexity involved.

Improves process automation reliability and fault tolerance

Process orchestration tools allow organizations to improve service availability as workflow complexity increases. You can reduce the risk of process failures by orchestrating fault monitoring, redundancy, alerting, and error recovery across applications, services, and environments.

Enables scalability

Organizations might face difficulties coordinating multiple IT systems manually when they scale their operations. As the disparate tasks become more complex, IT teams use specialized tools to automatically manage systems, infrastructure, workloads, and other requirements. For example, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies deploy microservices at scale using container orchestration tools.

Accelerates software deployment cycles

Development teams can expedite software application deployment by streamlining continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows with software orchestration tools. Conventionally, developers manually initiate each stage, such as code merging, user acceptance testing, and production release, which slows down time to deployment. With orchestration, these stages trigger automatically, improving efficiency and expediting the software development lifecycle.

AWS offers a range of services to help with container orchestration, workflow orchestration, infrastructure orchestration, and data pipeline orchestration. Consider your cloud orchestration needs and how you can meet them with AWS services:

• AWS CloudFormation helps to speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code. CloudFormation allows you to automate, test, and deploy infrastructure templates with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) automations.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that enables teams to build, manage, and run even the most demanding containerized workloads without the complexity of infrastructure management, freeing up development teams to innovate faster.
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) streamlines Kubernetes operations by automating cluster infrastructure management, so that your teams can focus on innovation.
• AWS Step Functions provides serverless orchestration for modern applications. The visual orchestration tool centrally manages a workflow by breaking it into multiple steps, adding flow logic, and tracking the inputs and outputs between the steps.

Get started with orchestration on AWS by creating a free account today.