Cloud Orchestration Optimizes Multi-cloud Management

Effective management of cloud-based resources is a growing challenge for corporate IT. As organizations migrate existing applications to the cloud and develop new capabilities, cloud systems handle massive volumes of data across multiple cloud environments.

Consequently, companies face a critical question: how to establish and maintain coherent processes with increasingly disparate systems?

To address this challenge effectively, IT organizations have begun using a new type of technology. Designed to facilitate cloud-based infrastructure management, cloud orchestration promises to greatly simplify management tasks.

In this post, you will learn about the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Additionally, we have listed the main cloud orchestration tools and pointed out how they can help you.

Read on to learn more!

Cloud Orchestration: What Is It and How to Apply It?

As the name suggests, orchestration points the way toward managing the cloud with speed, automation, integration, and appropriate costs. In short, the concept allows companies to optimize cloud computing management because it provides:

• Agility in resource allocation;
• Proper distribution of workloads among cloud-based resources;
• Organized deployment of a service across multiple servers or cloud environments;
• Cost reduction achieved through efficient cloud infrastructure management;
• Customization of cloud solutions according to company demand;
• Greater security and visibility, as available resources allow for continuous vulnerability scans, compliance testing, and configuration validation.

Use Cases: How Can Cloud Orchestration Be Applied in Practice?

Orchestration technologies have various applications. For example, they allow a company to hire services from different providers while managing all of them through a single management solution. Much simpler that way, isn’t it?

Another use case: orchestration allows for the automation of software installation on servers. Thus, it is possible to plan machines with specific functions, software, databases, and other components. In other words, orchestration scales, organizes, and executes installation, management, and configuration processes.

Orchestration technology also supports DevOps development models. This is because the model enables communication, collaboration, and continuous integration between development and infrastructure teams. As a result, the quality of services provided by the IT department can take a significant leap forward.

Orchestration Tools

Basically, there are three aspects of cloud orchestration:

• Resource Orchestration: focused on the allocation of physical resources like servers, memory, processing, backup, and others;
• Workload Orchestration: involving the sharing of workloads among resources;
• Service Orchestration: implementing solutions on servers or in cloud environments to plan automated management.

Currently, the market offers a range of mechanisms and tools for cloud orchestration. To choose the ideal tools for your business, it is best to understand the organization of the multi-cloud structure, and Edge UOL can help you with this.

Below, we present some of the cloud orchestration tools.

Infrastructure as Code (Cloud Native)

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

This tool allows you to automate the configuration and deployment of the Google cloud with parallel deployments and template-driven configurations. Additionally, the solution provides a rich set of features to manage all phases of configuring and managing your infrastructure, from resource creation to deletion.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

To implement infrastructure as code in Azure solutions, it is ideal to use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. The template is a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file that defines your project’s infrastructure and configuration. In practice, ARM uses declarative syntax, meaning it allows you to indicate what will be deployed without the need to describe the sequence of programming commands to create it. You simply specify the resources to be deployed and their properties.

AWS Cloud Formation

Companies relying on AWS infrastructure can use CloudFormation as a code tool to accelerate cloud provisioning. As a SaaS solution, CloudFormation allows you to describe a complete environment using software. The tool enables:

• Developing the set of related AWS and third-party resources;
• Provisioning the cloud quickly and consistently;
• Managing its lifecycle through infrastructure as code.

By using CloudFormation, you can describe desired resources and their dependencies and configure them together as a stack. Thus, instead of managing resources individually, the IT team uses a template to create, update, and delete an entire stack as a single unit. Management and provisioning in stacks can be done across multiple AWS accounts and regions.

Infrastructure as Code (Cloud Agnostic)

Terraform

Developed by HashiCorp, Terraform is one of the leading infrastructure-as-code solutions on the market that can be used across major cloud providers. It codifies infrastructure into configuration files that describe the topology of different cloud resources, such as virtual machines, storage accounts, and network interfaces.

Furthermore, Terraform allows for the deployment of infrastructure across multiple cloud providers. Using a simple engine and consistent resources, developers can manage the definition of each infrastructure. For organizations maintaining a hybrid cloud or a multi-cloud environment, Terraform is the ideal solution. Check out some of the tool’s differentiators:

• Open Source: Terraform has many communities of contributors creating plugins for the platform.
• Platform Agnostic: This means you can use it with all major cloud service providers.
• Immutable Infrastructure: With every change in the cloud environment, the current configuration is replaced by a new one accounting for the change, and the infrastructure is ‘re-provisioned’. This allows previous configurations to be kept for restoration if necessary, preventing configuration drift.

Configuration Management

In the market, the main solutions in this category are responsible for a series of processes, such as:

• Instance provisioning;
• Service configuration and application deployment;
• Creation and orchestration of IaaS services.

In an IaaS-based cloud orchestration strategy, tools like Chef and Puppet stand out. Notably, cloud providers offer these tools as services, such as AWS OpsWorks. Also in this category is Ansible, which has been gaining considerable ground among IT administrators due to its declarative language and ease of implementation.

Container Orchestrator: Kubernetes

Originally developed by Google, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. In fact, it has established itself as the de facto standard for container orchestration.

Today, it is the leading project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, supported by major players like Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, and RedHat. Cloud providers offer Kubernetes as a service, such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

The platform automates operations and eliminates many manual processes for deploying containerized applications, facilitating the management of a multi-cloud infrastructure. Kubernetes manages activities such as:

• Control of resource consumption per application or team;
• Even distribution of application loads across your infrastructure;
• Automatic loading and balancing of requests across different instances of an application;
• Inclusion of storage to run applications and health monitoring;
• Health checking and self-healing of applications.

Does cloud orchestration seem complex? Rely on Edge UOL as your multi-cloud technology partner. We want to simplify this process for you! Contact us to find out how!