Cloud Orchestration

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What Does Cloud Orchestration Mean?

Cloud orchestration is the automation of service deployment and integration in a cloud computing environment.

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More specifically, it is the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware, and services—all of which helps to accelerate the delivery of IT services while reducing costs. It is used to manage cloud infrastructure, which supplies and assigns required cloud resources to the customer like the creation of VMs, allocation of storage capacity, management of network resources, and granting access to cloud software. By using the appropriate orchestration mechanisms, users can deploy and start using services on servers or on any cloud platforms.

There are three aspects to cloud orchestration:

  • Resource orchestration, where resources are allocated
  • Workload orchestration, where workloads are shared between the resources
  • Service orchestration, where services are deployed on servers or cloud environments

Where cloud automation typically handles a single task, cloud orchestration helps to automate collections of tasks and generally streamline business processes.

Techopedia Explains Cloud Orchestration

Experts talk about "cloud orchestration" when they talk about serving architectures with multiple cloud automation components. For example, suppose there is customer data in a particular cloud database, and the company wants to route the data to other parts of the network to serve users in real time. Suppose they have to blend it with other data from another source, and use middleware to communicate all of this messaging to a set of end users. When all of these different things are done through different cloud automation processes, the result is cloud orchestration. Vendors talk about offering different cloud orchestration services and how that supports their clients’ operations. Cloud orchestration is one of the more sophisticated services offered to B2B customers to keep enterprise systems in good working order.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.