DEVOPS , TEST AUTOMATION

Automation and Orchestration: 6 Reasons

Why to Invest in DevOps Orchestration
Liana Grigoryan March 10, 2023

Nowadays, automation has become a vital part of every small or big business and whatever niche
industry. Whether you’re working in IT or marketing, you’ve probably heard of automation’s ability
to save resources and time and improve the productivity and correctness of different working
processes. However, by integrating automation, you could be unsure what to do next or whether
any barriers constrain your DevOps teams. And that’s where automation and orchestration come
into play.

The step after automation; is how sometimes DevOps orchestration is frequently called. It’s an
optimal way to manage, establish and track all cloud software development projects and
operations. Orchestration can accomplish a lot more difference in the development world. Let’s
look deeper at DevOps orchestration, its main benefits, why it’s worth investing in it and much
more.

Table Of Contents
What is Orchestration?

Are Orchestration and Automation the Same?

Automation vs Orchestration: The Key Differences

 What are the Goals of Automation and Orchestration?

Benefits of Orchestration and Automation Include

Why Invest in DevOps Orchestration?

6 Reasons to Invest in DevOps Orchestration

1. Ensure higher release quality

2. Reduce costs for IT and human resources

3. Speed up your automation process

4. Boost the pace of releases

5. Build transparency

6. Improve cross-team collaboration

DevOps Orchestration in Practice

How to Start Automating and Orchestrating?

How to Choose the Best DevOps Orchestration Tools?

4 Key Features of Orchestration

1. Container management:

2. Integrated automation:

3. Support for cloud-native technologies:

4. Integrate CI/CD pipeline:

Conclusion

So, to sum up, finally, why invest in DevOps Orchestration?

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the DevOps orchestration phases?

How is DevOps Best Orchestrated?

What is an Orchestration Tool?

Suggested Readings

What is Orchestration?
DevOps orchestration is a group of technologies that support software administration,
development, and monitoring. Continuous integration and delivery, containerization, cloud-based
services, monitoring, and analytics are all a part of DevOps orchestration. Developers collaborate
with IT operations and infrastructure teams to ensure that software is deployed as effectively and
rapidly as feasible.

To reduce production errors and speed up time to market, orchestration automates the execution
of several activities in the proper order. Multiple tasks may need to be completed as part of a
procedure. The goal of orchestration is to make managing large-scale, complicated systems
easier. Such tasks are integrated into a process or workflow via DevOps orchestration services,
which may also comprise several automated tasks, stages, and resources.DevOps’s primary
objective is to ensure adequate software delivery through intense team cooperation in creating,
testing, deploying, and scaling IT systems and applications. Dynamic workflows and automation
are needed to maintain effectiveness and reproducibility in these contexts. In addition to
decreasing workload failures, orchestration technologies help minimize development and
deployment costs and boost productivity.

Orchestration and automation seem similar in functionality, but let’s see if they’re the main
differences the same and what the main differences are.

Are Orchestration and Automation the Same?

DevOps orchestration is the automation of many processes that operate simultaneously to
decrease production difficulties and time to market. In contrast, automation is the ability to
repeatedly perform a task or set of tasks.

Automation is sometimes described as a single task instead of orchestration, which involves

several procedures across numerous platforms. Nevertheless, each process frequently involves
automating work that requires no human intervention. Although it may appear to be a layer, it is
simply automating automation at its foundation.

Automation involves “cutting or replacing human interaction with IT systems and instead
involving software to conduct operations to reduce cost, complexity, and errors,” according to one
of the industry’s experts. Is there a difference between orchestration and human engagement
with our systems? Yes, it coordinates systems that would be very challenging to perform
manually.

Automation vs Orchestration: The Key Differences

Both orchestrations and automation are two different things in the tech world. The latter
Automation makes things more accessible by using scripts or programs to do specific tasks
without doing them yourself. This saves time and helps you avoid mistakes. Orchestration, on the
other hand, is like a conductor in an orchestra – it makes sure all the automated tasks work
together properly and happen in the right order.

Automation uses software to do certain tasks, like saving time and money. Orchestration is when
you use multiple automation together to achieve a bigger goal. It’s like putting together a puzzle –
the pieces all have to fit in the right places to work! Orchestration helps ensure that everything
runs smoothly so you don’t have costly mistakes.

Let’s see why it’s worth investing in DevOps orchestration.

What are the Goals of Automation and Orchestration?

Goals of Automation is to make your life easier by using technology to do the boring, repetitive
stuff. You’ll make fewer mistakes and get better results by taking people out of the equation. Plus,
you’ll be sure that everything is done the same way every time and that you follow all the rules.

The goals of Orchestration are to make complex processes easier and less expensive. It does this
by automating and coordinating multiple tasks and workflows, optimizing resource usage,
minimizing manual work, and making it faster to respond to changing business needs. It also
gives you a central view of all automated processes to see what’s happening and have more
control over your IT operations.

Benefits of Orchestration and Automation Include

Automation helps in Automating repetitive tasks can help you save time and do things more
accurately. You don’t have to worry about making mistakes since the computer will handle them.
This also means that people can focus on more critical tasks, so they won’t have to do them
themselves. Automation also ensures everything is done according to rules and regulations, which
is excellent if you try to stay organized. Lastly, automation helps organizations handle bigger
workloads while still not having to hire more people!

Orchestration can help streamline processes and make things easier. It helps you automate and
coordinate multiple tasks and workflows, so you don’t have to worry about making mistakes or
being late. It also makes it easier to adapt quickly to changes in business requirements, giving you
more control over IT operations. Plus, it helps optimize the use of resources, meaning you save
money while still getting the job done! Finally, orchestration can help ensure your business is
prepared for disasters by automating backup and recovery processes.

Why Invest in DevOps Orchestration?

DevOps teams need a solution for intelligent tool piloting because they must navigate between
departments. DevOps orchestration solutions, which can mix several mechanical components
from various DevOps toolkits, are required in this case.

Teams can use their present automation technologies while cooperating under a broad framework
that unifies everything into a single process by investing in DevOps orchestration.

Keep reading, and don’t miss the six proven reasons that will help you reduce doubts about
investing in DevOps orchestration, make processes more accessible, save time and cut extra costs.

Know more about Why DevOps is Important?

6 Reasons to Invest in DevOps Orchestration

1. Ensure higher release quality

DevOps orchestration reduces all the errors in these processes and reaches the end-user by
including the quality control procedures like approvals, scheduling, security testing, and automatic
status reporting. Suppose your business uses DMARC checker as an integral part of your email
marketing strategy. In that case, you probably use automation, so the orchestration will help to
increase engagement and improve the correctness of these processes.

2. Reduce costs for IT and human resources

The number of IT staff needed and infrastructure investment expenses are reduced with DevOps
orchestration. In the long run, businesses can increase the footprint of their cloud services and
have more control over how they allocate their costs.

3. Speed up your automation process

DevOps orchestration decreases the labor required for recurring processes while ensuring
seamless and rapid delivery of fresh builds into production. DevOps teams can concentrate on
more important tasks and decision-making than pipeline construction.

4. Boost the pace of releases

DevOps orchestration involves a significant amount of automation and the movement of software
automatically through specific procedures, such as testing, and on to the next stage of a release
pipeline. Software reaches the end user faster, and wait time is diverted to the next project due to
DevOps orchestration. This eliminates the time spent waiting for another employee to execute
manual tasks and transmit the program to the next step in the process.

5. Build transparency
When responsibilities and information are categorized, it is challenging to establish clarity and
openness throughout a project. DevOps orchestration is used throughout the development
lifecycle to coordinate all tasks, centralize data relating to all processes, and communicate
changes and progress to essential stakeholders.

6. Improve cross-team collaboration

Effective communication between the operation and development teams is boosted by having a
platform where all activities are consolidated and updated continuously. This keeps everyone in
sync, improves unified communications, and increases productivity.

DevOps Orchestration in Practice

DevOps is an IT cultural change that combines the methods used by developers, operations, and
quality assurance (QA) testers to create outcomes that are larger than the sum of their individual
parts. The best use of orchestration services for a business is in a DevOps environment.

Check out: Article about Test Orchestration

However, orchestration is made to operate both within and above such barriers, whereas the
inherent barriers between the groups would still constrain traditional automation at this level.

Due to DevOps orchestration, the development and operations teams quickly experience
significant vertical and horizontal changes.

DevOps orchestration connects teams via a centralized dashboard to prevent information silos,
improve communication, and foster cross-team cooperation. Teams can quickly fix issues and
make sound decisions even in the most challenging circumstances. The development team can
now focus on innovation by separating runnable programs into distinct components for simpler
testing and quicker upgrades.

DevOps orchestration’s predetermined configurations and serverless monitoring system also

assist the operations team in managing the IT infrastructure and scalability practically.

Managing a multi-tier architecture, often known as an n-tier architecture, is a typical example of

using orchestration. Consider a two-tier system that uses a pool of web servers and a database
tier. Before the web server processes are launched, orchestration can ensure the database setup
operations have been completed, and the database is available. Other instances could be
managing DNS, firewalls, monitoring, load balancers, routing, and more.

Next, you will be introduced to the practical techniques (also known as tools) for using DevOps
orchestration. You’ll also learn how to choose the best tools and what factors to consider.
Search

How to Start Automating and Orchestrating?

Automation and orchestration are great ways to make your life easier! By automating the tedious
tasks of your daily routine, you can save time and energy for more important things. To get
started, determine which tasks in your daily routine can be automated, choose the right tools, and
create scripts or programs to execute those tasks. Here are some tips to get started with
automation and orchestration:

1. Figure out which tasks and workflows can be automated or orchestrated. This could be
anything from repetitive tasks, complex processes or those with many steps.

2. Look into tools like Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and Kubernetes to help you get what you want
to be done.

3. Figure out what the goals are for your automation or orchestration project and how you’ll
measure success.

4. Start small with more straightforward tasks and slowly build up until you do more
complicated stuff.

5. Make sure your team is trained, so they know how to manage automated or orchestrated
workflows.

How to Choose the Best DevOps Orchestration Tools?

One of the foundational elements of the contemporary software business is DevOps tools. They
encourage quick, dependable, high-quality software delivery methods for the customer’s age,
reducing the time between software creation and deployment. DevOps orchestration tools ramp
up automation across various operations to manage complicated, resource-sensitive activities like
provisioning, scalability, load-balancing, and security. This results in a dynamic workflow that
can’t simply be cobbled together.

DevOps orchestration tools leverage automation to streamline and improve the infrastructure,
workflows, and IT-driven operations. As a result, costs are decreased overall, productivity is
raised, and cross-team collaboration is improved since employees can function more effectively
and productively as a team.

The correct orchestration strategy or tool should be chosen based on various considerations,
including business size, DevOps skills, business objectives, and financial resources. Business and
IT leaders can adopt open-source tools to address infrastructure or technological gaps brought on
by a lack of funding.

So, here are four key features of orchestration that are essential to consider while choosing the
right orchestration tool for your organization.

4 Key Features of Orchestration

1. Container management:
Orchestration tools should be able to manage microservices and infrastructure built on containers.
This capability is crucial because Kubernetes and containers are now the go-to methods for
scaling software development and modernizing legacy programs.

2. Integrated automation:
An effective orchestration tool must have automation pervasively woven into its operations’
fabric, especially those operations that disproportionately impact productivity and cost-
effectiveness. Examples include automated testing and testing technologies.

3. Support for cloud-native technologies:

The software has moved to the cloud. The phrase “create once, deploy everywhere” is thus made
a reality through orchestration technologies. So, in addition to installing on-premise systems,
cloud computing support should be a priority.

4. Integrate CI/CD pipeline:

Continuous integration and continuous delivery capabilities are commonly associated with
DevOps tools. To enable the rapid development and delivery of well-tested, high-quality software,
an orchestration tool should be outfitted with reliable CI/CD pipelines.

Get the list of Top 10 DevOps Orchestration Tools.

Conclusion
Any business needs automation processes to be integrated into daily and other working
operations. Typically, companies begin with a small-scale solution and, once thriving, organize
their best practices using a system that combines connectivity into a single reliable process. This is
because automation can only increase efficiency to a certain point; therefore, orchestration in
DevOps is required if you want to elevate your releases.

To reduce production issues and speed up time to market, orchestration automates the execution
of several activities in the proper order. Multiple tasks may need to be completed as part of a
procedure. And as we can see, this is not the only benefit of investing in DevOps orchestration.

Teams can reduce conflict and quality problems by collaborating to create software artifacts due
to DevOps orchestration. The orchestration is made possible by a contemporary DevOps platform
that uses cloud automation, allowing development teams to eliminate silos, automate tasks, and
produce higher-quality software.

So, to sum up, finally, why invest in DevOps Orchestration?

DevOps teams require a comprehensive solution that aids in navigating between departments
and lets smart usage of different tools. Therefore, a DevOps automation and orchestration
solution must combine many automated components from various DevOps technologies. You can
use DevOps automation and orchestration to deploy automation technologies and collaborate
under a broad framework that unifies everything into a single workflow.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the DevOps orchestration phases?

DevOps orchestration is a process that has four steps. First, you need to provision, which means
setting up and customizing your tools and resources. Second, configuration management ensures
your software and apps are set up correctly. Third, deployment involves getting new updates out
to the public. Finally, monitoring looks at how everything works and helps you fix any problems.

How is DevOps Best Orchestrated?

DevOps is all about working together to get the job done. It means eliminating any barriers
between developers, operations staff, and other teams. It also means using agile and lean
practices to get things done quickly and efficiently, plus using automation tools to make work
easier. All of this adds up to better communication and faster improvement!

What is an Orchestration Tool?

An orchestration tool is a type of software that helps make complicated tasks easier. It can run
multiple processes and activities across different systems and environments simultaneously.
Popular examples of these tools are Ansible, Kubernetes, Puppet, and Chef. They provide a single
place to set up workflows, start tasks, and check how everything is going.

Suggested Readings
DevOps Orchestration Tools

Test Orchestration

Devops and Need for Cloud-Based Solution

Why DevOps is Important?

DevOps Platforms

DevOps Automation Tools

DevOps Orchestration Tools