According to the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPS report, “By 2027, 90% of organizations currently delivering workload automation will be using service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAPs) to orchestrate workloads and data pipelines in hybrid environments across IT and business domains.” Here’s how cloud-focused IT teams can make the transition.
The impact of cloud computing
Most organizations rely on cloud services, resources and platforms for one reason or another —to reduce capital expenses, ensure reliable scalability or flexibility in providing new services or quickly deploy new technologies. These capabilities are essential to digital transformation and underlie most modernization projects.
But the growth in cloud environments has put a strain on IT teams, who often find themselves managing increasingly complex environments (custom scripts to integrate legacy mainframes, multi-cloud to avoid vendor lock-in, server sprawl and unreliable processes) with insufficient IT resources.
To adapt to these new demands, IT teams can leverage automation and orchestration tools to simplify and optimize the management of hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud or cloud-native environments.
What is cloud automation?
As the cost of cloud computing drops, more cloud-based tools are being adopted, multiplying the number of tasks IT must accomplish. Cloud automation tools are used to reduce the volume of manual tasks required to manage cloud resources and environments.
Cloud automation tools effectively enable IT to accomplish more with less, reducing operational expenses, minimizing errors and preventing delays. Cloud automation tools can also be used to implement infrastructure-as-code, removing the need to manually configure and manage critical resources.
Cloud automation tools can be used to:
- Configure and install systems, containers or virtual machines
- Provision and deprovision servers for auto-scaling
- Allocate resources for workloads to optimize performance
Whether IT needs to back up data, update applications or keep track of deployed instances, automation tools can reduce the need for human intervention, giving IT more time to work on higher-value projects that impact long-term goals.
What are cloud orchestration tools?
Cloud orchestration tools enable IT to integrate, monitor and manage cross-platform processes and the infrastructure those processes rely on. Cloud orchestration tools make it easier to assemble automated tasks into end-to-end processes, often without the need for additional coding.
Cloud orchestration is important for two reasons:
- Automated tasks don’t exist on their own. If a new application is being deployed, IT must configure and provision the right resources, set up permissions, provide regular updates and more. Orchestration allows IT to coordinate these tasks into end-to-end processes.
- IT is increasingly heterogeneous. Most organizations need to maintain on-premises infrastructure or data centers. These legacy systems do not easily integrate with cloud-based systems without the use of custom scripts. Cloud orchestration tools provide methods to quickly integrate disparate applications and platforms under a single solution.
Many cloud providers offer automation tools to streamline configuration management for instances (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware and Google Cloud, for example). But these tools aren’t designed for cross-platform processes, forcing IT to create and manage custom scripts or succumb to vendor lock-in.
Cloud orchestration tools offer a way for IT to integrate a variety of disparate applications and systems and to assemble end-to-end processes that can be managed and monitored from a single location. This enables IT to quickly deploy new technologies and to increase ROI on existing resources by creating processes that were otherwise unachievable.
Automation vs. orchestration: What’s the difference?
There’s an awful lot of discussion about the differences between automation and orchestration, but it’s important to stay away from either/or simplifications. Automation and orchestration are related concepts — you can’t really have orchestration without automating processes.
For example, automation exists because the number of tasks and processes IT is responsible for has grown exponentially. There’s no feasible way for IT to manually execute everything that has to be done on a daily basis. Likewise, the number of applications and systems IT is responsible for has grown so that it’s no longer feasible to rely on custom scripts to integrate a growing number of solutions and processes.
Looking at it this way, you can see that orchestration is a necessary step in the evolution of computing, just as automation is. With an automation tool, users can automate a cloud-based ETL task. With an orchestration tool, users can build an end-to-end process that includes provisioning cloud infrastructure through a tool like Puppet or Ansible, authenticating users with Active Directory and monitoring those resources through an open-source tool like Nagios. The DevOps team can then quickly integrate new sources of data without creating the process from scratch and without having to write custom scripts.
How do I know which one I need?
“Service orchestration and automation platforms have become crucial for deploying complex workloads that deliver business services. These platforms combine workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure. Increasingly, they are central to an organization’s ability to deploy workloads and to optimize deployments as a part of cost and availability initiatives.”
2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPS report
IT teams using PaaS or IaaS solutions are likely already using some form of automation to streamline cloud management processes. This usually means vendor-specific automation tools, third-party solutions or custom scripts. Given that custom scripts are time-consuming and vendor-specific tools create silos that increase complexity, this leaves us with third-party tools — ideally, orchestration platforms.
Gartner refers to today’s enterprise workload automation solutions as Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs). According to the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPS report, these tools are characterized by three mandatory features:
- Managing workloads in complex technology and deployment topologies
- Managing workflows that span the operating environment
- Broad integration capabilities
They provide direct integrations and low-code API accessibility that enable IT to rapidly integrate new tools and technologies, allowing users to assemble reliable, cross-platform processes.
Orchestration tools provide the capabilities organizations require to be successful in the cloud, with the added advantage of being able to quickly adapt to new market demands and technology trends (microservices, containerization, distributed computing).
So, to answer the question, instead of focusing on automation for a single system, long-term IT and business goals are best served by orchestration solutions, such as distributed job schedulers, that can quickly integrate and automate a range of tools and technologies.
Benefits of cloud orchestration tools
Cloud orchestration tools provide a single location for IT to automate, monitor and manage processes that span private cloud, public cloud or on-premises infrastructure. IT teams can coordinate existing infrastructure automation tools (Terraform, Chef, Ansible), consolidate cloud management tools (Saltstack, Rackware), and unify control over IT processes and business processes.
Orchestration tools provide a range of capabilities that can include DevOps tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery, as well as real-time monitoring and auto-remediation. Orchestration tools are designed to be extensible, providing support for numerous operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc.) and scripting languages (Python, PHP, Java, etc.), making it easier to pass configuration files when deploying IT infrastructure assets in distributed environments. Orchestration tools can also be deployed using AWS CloudFormation or as a SaaS solution.
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