Skip to content
Skip to search
Skip to footer

What Is Cloud Orchestration?

Cloud orchestration is the combined automation of apps, workloads, supporting resources, and infrastructure across one or more cloud platforms—public and/or private. It commonly includes imperative and/or declarative methods to drive automation.

Contact Cisco

How do cloud automation and orchestration differ?

Cloud automation involves programmatically performing an operation on an individual component of an application, workload, resource, or infrastructure within a cloud platform. Such operations can be querying a database, configuring a switch port setting, or powering on a server.

Cloud automation comprises the building blocks for delivering cloud orchestration, which is the process of coordinating multiple, interconnected and often interdependent automated tasks across multiple components to achieve a specific goal, like creating, updating, or removing an app deployment.

Cloud orchestration helps IT organizations reduce manual, repetitive work, better standardize their deployments and operations, and accelerate delivery. Most IT organizations employ multiple cloud orchestration methods, sometimes in combination, to best suit varying operational requirements.

For example, some follow an imperative method of executing the automation building blocks in a procedural way using workflows. Another approach follows a declarative method of specifying the desired outcome and relying on internal algorithms to derive the operations and procedures required to deliver that outcome.

What are the options for cloud orchestration?

Businesses have many options to consider for cloud orchestration and the most effective choice depends on the specific needs of the IT organization and their operational methods.

For example, a business that relies on in-house application development may focus on declarative forms of cloud orchestration designed to serve DevOps practices and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline integration.

However, a business managing the continuous operations and lifecycle of commercial applications may need a more imperative approach to cloud orchestration to manage dynamic operational demands.

Many organizations use multiple forms of cloud orchestration to best suit varying requirements. Some businesses use a declarative approach to orchestrate the deployment of baseline application and/or infrastructure blueprints, and then shift to imperative forms of orchestration for more adaptive operations and lifecycle management.

Some cloud orchestration offerings work with specific cloud services and platforms to provide more prebuilt, out-of-the-box capability, while others provide a broader, more extensible framework to enable deeper customization and a larger scope to address multicloud and hybrid cloud requirements.

Also, some providers offer cloud orchestration tools to achieve certain goals, like operational cost arbitrage, optimization, or policy compliance.

Benefits of cloud orchestration

Operational efficiency

IT teams can focus on projects that create greater value for business and problem-solve more efficiently when they don't have to spend time on manual and time-consuming tasks like provisioning services, configuring applications, resources and infrastructure.

Reduced costs through better organization

Cloud orchestration helps businesses streamline cloud-related costs. When cloud infrastructure expands and becomes more complex, it can easily become disorganized. This makes it more challenging for IT administrators to manage cloud resources effectively.

Through cloud orchestration, IT admins gain a more thorough understanding of the resource consumption and ongoing needs of their stakeholders and the business. They can readily identify where and how various users, apps, and services are consuming resources, and better manage their efficiency, costs, and planning for future requirements.

The standardization and automation provided by cloud orchestration helps IT teams scale and optimize workloads more easily. When IT finds a mismatch between workload requirements and the resources supporting them, cloud orchestration can adapt those resources to realign with workload demands.

Overprovisioned resources can be scaled down automatically to optimize costs, while underprovisioned resources can be scaled up automatically to optimize workload performance and resilience. This standardization and automation also help to mitigate the high costs of troubleshooting and fulfillment delays due to human error.

Cloud orchestration can be used to automate the reclamation of unused capacity and return it to resource pools. Doing so saves unnecessary operating expenses and expansion costs by efficiently recycling the reclaimed capacity to fulfill other requirements.

More visibility and control

As previously noted, a growing cloud environment can become complex and difficult to manage, fast. With a cloud orchestration solution, IT administrators can access a unified dashboard that provides an overall view of cloud resources. They get centralized management of their cloud ecosystem, which gives them with more control, while also reducing manual work.

More business agility

Cloud orchestration helps organizations create a more organized, effective, and responsive cloud operating model to increase business agility. For example, by reducing the time it takes to provision, deprovision, and redeploy IT infrastructure, organizations can move faster to innovate and deliver new products and services that can drive revenue.

Cloud orchestration can also help business users, DevOps and IT teams invest more of their time into growth and innovation by delivering the speed and convenience of self-service delivery. Self-service models promote the use of prebuilt, standardized deployment templates that comply with IT policies and security controls. Cloud orchestration holds a critical role in providing an on-demand service model and enabling continuous integration and continuous delivery.

Cloud orchestration is an essential part of IT transformation that helps organizations focus more of their time and talents on their core business development, modernization, and enhancement by reducing the burdens of operations and maintenance.