Cloud orchestration tools help IT organizations to speed up service delivery and cut costs. A cloud orchestrator essentially automates the management, coordination, and organization of complex services, computer systems, and middleware.
Other than reducing the involvement of personnel, cloud orchestration helps eliminate potential errors in cloud processes. It also supports the delivery of resources to end-users and customers. Providers can implement this as a self-service model where users have resources delivered on-demand without the intervention of IT.
With the right orchestration software, enterprises can standardize templates and enforce security policies. It also works as excellent protection from VM sprawl by providing visibility and control over cloud resources and costs.
The orchestrator oversees interactions between a multitude of disparate elements of the application stack. It helps simplify communication and connections between workloads, apps, and users. It also makes sure to configure and maintain links correctly. The best-in-class orchestration software comes with a web-based portal that gives enterprises a single plane of glass view.
So, what are the top features that providers should incorporate into their cloud orchestration tools to make them more appealing to enterprises? Here are a few:
Support for Multiple Types of Virtual Machines
Orchestration tools should support multiple types of virtual machines. These include Hyper-V, ESX, Xen, and kernel-based VMs. This is because the workloads of enterprise customers usually require a compatible platform to run in.
Moreover, you can create reusable applications and workload templates. They can come in handy in the future for separate requests. This helps improve efficiencies and accelerate turnup.
DevOps Tools
Cloud orchestration tools should incorporate DevOps tools, such as Chef and Puppet, to complement the use of templates. This is a part of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that can help accelerate deployment.
Role-Based Access
It’s important to have role-based access for customer personnel and the provider’s teams. This ensures the system grants permissions based on what a person has the authorization to access. This makes it possible to conduct audit trails.
Reasonable Cost Structure
Providers need to align the cost of licensing the cloud orchestration tools with the expected deployments. They should look at the various cost points for deployments of different sizes. This should also include the cost of special capabilities, such as monitoring modules, analytics, and billing API (application programming interface) integrations.
Extra Analysis
There may be a need for extra analysis in some environments. This is particularly important if the goal is to orchestrate the deployment of applications from the cloud. Load balancing, an intrusion detection platform, and a virtual firewall are some modules enterprises may use in their configurations. Normally, these will call for deployment in a service-chain design that’s specific to the application. For this reason, it’s important to determine whether cloud orchestration tools support the creation of service chains. Also, check whether specific virtual appliances are compatible.
Integration with Other Cloud Providers
A customer may need to integrate or federate with other cloud providers. In such a scenario, the customer will need cloud orchestration software that supports the federation of services through pre-integrated deployment templates. This enables communication with Amazon Web Services, IBM, HP, Google Cloud Platform, and other providers.
Deployment Speed
Providers need to consider the speed of deployment of their tools. This is largely dependent on whether the tools have a truly extensible operational support system (OSS) and APIs. They also need to provide a conducive development environment for creating these extensions.
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