When companies try and sell legacy software wrapped up in new fancy words such as Cloud, Orchestration and Automation and create white papers you may want to consider what qualifies them to write white papers.
Here is what you need to know about Automation and Orchestration
What is automation?
When we hear about automation, it’s typically in reference to making entire processes or workflows run. This isn’t quite right.
The definition of automation is setting up a single task to run on its own—automating one task. Automating a task can apply to both desktop-only tasks and cloud tasks. This single task can be anything:
• Launching a web server
• Stopping a service
• Integrating a web app
• Channeling an email to a predetermined folder
Individuals can automate daily tasks to improve their efficiency, but companies of all industries and sizes look to automation to increase efficiency at scale.
What is orchestration?
Frequently, orchestration is what we actually mean when we are talking about automating. Orchestration is automating many tasks together. It’s automation not of a single task but an entire IT-driven process. Orchestrating a process, then, is automating a series of individual tasks to work together.
If orchestration sounds more fancier than automation, that’s because it is—at least it is more complex. In enterprise IT, orchestrating a process requires:
1. Knowing and understanding the many steps involved.
2. Tracking each step across a variety of environments: applications, mobile devices, and databases, for instance.
More formally, the definition of orchestration includes the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of:
• Computer systems
• Middleware
• Services
Use cases for orchestration
Orchestration takes advantage of multiple tasks that are automated in order to automatically execute a larger workflow or process. These could be comprised of multiple tasks that are automated and could involve multiple systems.
The goal of orchestration is to streamline and optimize frequent, repeatable processes. Companies know that the shorter the time-to-market, the more likely they’ll achieve success. Anytime a process is repeatable, and its tasks can be automated, orchestration can be used to optimize the process in order to eliminate redundancies.
For tech-enabled companies (which is practically everyone), the main use cases for orchestration include:
• Speedier software development
• Batch processing daily transactions
• Managing many servers and applications
• Data analytics
Here’s an example: A developer needs to enter a line of code throughout the software. At first glance, it the developer may think it’s a quick line of code that’s easy to manually insert. But entering code manually, by hand, introduces the risk of human error. This risk must be minimized in live environments in particular. Even if this risk is introduced in testing, the developer still spends valuable time fixing an unnecessary error.
Instead, the developer can opt to orchestrate this additional code by automating the individual tasks that comprise the process of inserting this code. That’s nice on its own—it might not even seem necessary. Importantly, however, the developer ensures that bad code isn’t entered, increasing efficiency.
Automation and orchestration benefits
Automating one task may impress your users or make them aware that something has sped up a little bit. On its own, simple automations will not make a big perceivable difference. But when automation is built into a series of processes and workflows, which are then orchestrated to run automatically, there can be endless benefits.
