Automation vs. Orchestration: What’s the Difference?
Whether your applications and data are on-site or in the cloud, automation helps business processes run smoothly. The more workloads you’re managing, the more helpful these tools will be no matter what your IT strategy is.
To understand automation vs. orchestration, it’s helpful to consider each function on its own, first.
What is IT automation?
Automation, generally speaking, means completing a single task or function without human intervention. Executed wisely, automation makes traditionally time-intensive, manual processes more efficient and reliable.
In IT, it’s possible to automate a wide range of processes and tasks, from app deployment and integration, to securing endpoints and creating service tickets, for both on-premise and cloud tasks.. In cloud automation, you can use tools and machine learning. These help you deploy assets to the cloud.
They also manage cloud computing workloads. You can even classify large amounts of images. Our partner, Google Cloud, can assist you with this.
What is orchestration?
At its core, Orchestration is most akin to managing a large-scale virtual environment or network. Coordinating the scheduling and integration of automated tasks between complex systems and services makes work easier. This applies to both on-premise and cloud environments.
It helps to simplify interconnected workloads, repeatable processes, and operations. Using today’s orchestration tools, you can automate the arrangement, coordination and management of complex computer systems, middleware and services within your computing environment, and direct automated processes to support larger workflows.
With modern IT teams now responsible for managing hundreds to thousands of applications and servers, manual administration simply can’t scale today’s needs. Orchestration is essential for delivering highly available, dynamically scaling, performant applications, and cloud systems, relieving your team of a very heavy burden.
The difference between automation and orchestration
So, while automation refers to a single task, orchestration arranges tasks to optimize a workflow.
For example, orchestrating an app means not only deploying an application, but also connecting it to the network so it can communicate with users and other apps. In the cloud, orchestration is important.
It helps make sure that automated tasks, like auto-scaling, happen in the right order It also ensures that the system sets the correct security rules and permissions. To learn more, check out this blog about the critical role of network segmentation in cybersecurity.
IT orchestration tools
Once you’ve grasped the basic difference between automation and orchestration, it pays to get a sense of the variety of orchestration tools out there today.
TechTarget points out that there are plenty of IT orchestration tools available, including:
- Script based application deployment tools.
- Advanced solutions like Kubernete for container orchestration.
Integrated solutions, like our Cloud Orchestration Platform, provide additional functionality by:
- Utilizing leading third-party tools like Terraform, CloudBees, and HyperCloud.
- Empowering teams to create templates for entire environments or complex distributed systems.
- Supporting deployment in the cloud or on-premises
Tapping into automation vs. orchestration expertise
Together, automation and orchestration can help reduce IT costs, ramp up productivity, and free up personnel focus for more strategic pursuits. However choosing the right tools to succeed with both takes time. That’s one reason that some organizations are opting to use Burwood Group’s Managed Services or Cloud Orchestration Platform—it saves time and sidesteps the need to make capital investments in automation and orchestration tools.
For questions or further guidance on automation and orchestration strategy, contact Burwood’s multi-cloud orchestration team.
