What Is Cloud Orchestration?
Cloud orchestration is the management and coordination of cloud resources—computing, storage, and networking. Specific workloads are assigned to the most appropriate set of nodes based on the demands of the application.
In this self-service model, end users can request cloud services without involving IT. Policies and procedures govern the automatic provisioning of resources for different types of workloads. Cloud orchestration also involves mechanisms to ensure the efficient delivery of the requested workloads to end users. By optimizing resource utilization, cloud orchestration can support a DevOps approach that helps your end users roll out new applications quickly.
Cloud Orchestration Vs. Cloud Automation
Cloud automation reduces the manual work required by IT teams by automating cloud-related tasks, such as application deployment. Cloud orchestration can coordinate these automated tasks on a large scale. Orchestration tools can help IT teams manage incredibly complex cloud environments, from hardware to middleware to services.
Cloud orchestrators are a set of policy-based software tools to enable automation in the cloud. IT teams can choose from open source platforms like OpenStack, Apache Mesos, and Kubernetes, or products from software vendors. In addition, many popular public cloud service providers offer cloud orchestrators.
Benefits of Cloud Orchestration
With orchestration services, IT teams can improve resource allocation and help end users work more efficiently. This is especially true when working across a range of cloud service models, with a variety of on-premises resources and public cloud instances. Benefits of cloud orchestration include:
- Support for cloud automation: Orchestration can automate the provisioning of servers, storage, databases, and other resources.
- Visibility and control: A cloud orchestration dashboard provides a unified view of cloud resources and their usage.
- Self-service models: Cloud orchestration can enable on-demand, self-service functionalities for a “pay-as-you-go” business model.
- Remediation: Event-driven or policy-based remediation helps minimize down time and improve service level agreements (SLAs).
- Cost efficiency: Automated metering and chargebacks help improve cost governance while promoting the most economic use of resources.
With cloud orchestration, IT teams can improve resource allocation and end users can work more efficiently.
Container Orchestration in the Cloud
A container is a stand-alone software package that contains an entire runtime environment for an application. Containers are a flexible, portable way to support cloud-native applications, stateless microservices, and applications that must scale across a range of environments. They can also be deployed as Containers as a Service (CaaS), a type of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Kubernetes is an open-source tool for automating the deployment and management of containerized applications. Engineers at Intel have contributed to the Node Feature Discovery (NFD) add-on for Kubernetes, enabling the discovery of Intel® Xeon® processor capabilities like Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) or Intel® Turbo Boost. This helps ensure these hardware features can be accessed and utilized efficiently within a Kubernetes cluster.
Using Cloud Orchestration to Make the Most of Intel® Technologies
Intel engineers work within the cloud ecosystem to expose the unique capabilities of our hardware to orchestration tools. For example, we label core Intel® CPU functionalities—including Intel® Deep Learning Boost (Intel® DL Boost) and Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512)—so that developers can use their choice of instruction sets in a Kubernetes environment. We’ve also worked to expose technologies such as Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) and Intel® Optane™ persistent memory.
For optimized orchestration and automation, Intel® Resource Director Technology (Intel® RDT) brings new visibility to resource management. It offers a leap forward in workload consolidation density, performance consistency, and dynamic service delivery.
Looking ahead, cloud orchestration, alongside telemetry, is playing a major role in enabling the modern autonomous data center. This proactive approach to data center management is designed to minimize downtime and achieve higher reliability. By helping hardware and software resources work together seamlessly, orchestration offers a step toward maximizing quality of service with the greatest efficiency.