Many parts of the cloud overlap in how they achieve an end result for a business – conceptually, the whole concept of cloud is merely a vehicle to an outcome rather than an end in and of itself. However, one area in particular is too often mistaken and the source of many misunderstandings: orchestration vs automation.
So what’s the real difference?
Cloud orchestration is an integrated component of the cloud software. When we think about orchestration, it’s in terms of how it’s a process that the end user never truly needs to understand deeply. Its germane in the sense that when a user makes a call to the cloud, whether through a web interface, or an API call to the API handler of the cloud interface to deploy the VM, orchestration really encompasses all the things that the cloud middleware layer is doing to deploy the VM.
In a sense it is a form of cloud automation, but it’s an integral part of automation for how a complete cloud system works. When you say ‘Deploy a VM” memory has to be allocated on the hypervisor, so the orchestration process has to first it has to figure out which pod, cluster, host, etc. can host that VM… there’s a lot that has to be orchestrated, which is why we call it orchestration.
The end result is you have a VM.
When we say automation, we’re really talking about layering technologies above and beyond that orchestration. At the very basic level, when deploying a VM, you get to say “I want to deploy a web VM,” and it will spin up with your web stack on it, and it will install PHP, Ruby on Rails, Apache, Engine X, or whatever on that machine. It will update, pull in your codebase, and when its ultimately finished, you have a web server that’s functional. And all you had to do was say “I want a web server.”
Automation can be taken to new levels as well. The basic process creates a very fundamental building block in cloud computing. Then technologies like auto-scaling can be layered on, and you can say “when a threshold of traffic reaches X amount, spin up 10 more web servers. When we see X amount of reads on the data base, spin up 10 more read slaves on the database.” This is a powerful way to allow your cloud to match demand, freeing you up to focus on more important work critical to the main goals of your business.
Find out more about cloud automation and our cloud solutions, contact Server Guru.
