What is enterprise orchestration?

After a tumultuous 2022 for technology investment and talent, 2023 has seen a resurgence of enthusiasm about technology’s potential to catalyze progress in business and society. Generative AI has been a significant driver for this revival, but it's just one of many advances on the horizon that could drive sustainable, inclusive growth and solve complex global challenges. The McKinsey Technology Council has identified and interpreted the most significant technology trends unfolding today, providing valuable insights for executives to plan ahead.

Forrester's annual survey on digital process automation has consistently provided valuable insights into the evolving landscape of enterprise orchestration. The 2023 edition of this survey is no exception, shedding light on the latest trends and best practices.

Furthermore, as businesses are constantly seeking ways to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and drive innovation, new innovative approaches and technologies emerge. One of these key strategies is enterprise orchestration. This comprehensive article delves deep into the concept of enterprise orchestration, its significance, and its differentiation from related terms.

The growing importance of enterprise orchestration

As companies try to deal with the challenges of digital transformation, the role of such platforms has come to the forefront. They are designed to develop complex process applications that encompass process modelling, orchestration, and monitoring. In essence, enterprise orchestration platforms serve as the backbone for automation fabric solutions, ensuring seamless integration and coordination of various automated processes.

What is enterprise orchestration?

Enterprise orchestration is the art and science of automating, coordinating, and managing intricate workflows and services across a multi-technology enterprise infrastructure. It's akin to a maestro ensuring every instrument in an orchestra plays in perfect harmony, optimizing performance across the board.

Enterprise orchestration refers to the automated arrangement, coordination and management of complex workflows and services across an entire multi-technology enterprise infrastructure. It involves overseeing and synchronizing all the moving parts to ensure optimal performance.

Dissecting key concepts of enterprise orchestration

To better understand enterprise orchestration, we need to put it a bigger technological context. Distinctions are drawn between workflow/orchestration, cloud automation/orchestration, and data integration/orchestration based on scope and purpose.

What is the difference between workflow and orchestration?

While a workflow is a series of repeatable tasks within a process, orchestration scales this up, coordinating multiple workflows across teams, systems, and tools. The goal? Seamless interaction and optimized business processes.

Orchestration works not only with high-level processes, but also with low-level services and even lower-level virtual infrastructure, measuring changing demand and growing to meet it. In this way, you could say that orchestration is the next step after processing.

What is the difference between cloud automation and cloud orchestration?

Cloud automation refers to software that automates specific cloud tasks like server provisioning, reducing manual work. However, automating individual resources becomes complex at scale.

Cloud orchestration provides a holistic approach through a platform that manages interactions between workloads on private and public clouds using programming approaches. It coordinates automated tasks across multiple clouds for an integrated workflow.

With businesses increasingly utilising a mix of cloud products including public, private hybrid, and multi-cloud services, the resulting ecosystem is extremely complicated, with data and applications running across several environments. To handle these disparate workloads in an automated, ordered manner, organisations require cloud orchestration platforms to manage everything as a single workflow.

This is where Kubeark comes in, as our platform allows businesses to make their products available in a wide range of cloud environments and enables IT teams to concentrate more on business logic and customisation than on the fundamental cloud deployability infrastructure.

What is the difference between data integration and data orchestration?

Data integration transfers or replicates data between systems to make it available in databases and data warehouses. Data orchestration, on the other hand, sets up workflows and rules to coordinate this transfer based on specific business rules and events.

What are the benefits of enterprise orchestration?

Enterprise orchestration offers transformative benefits for modern organizations, enabling them to navigate complexity with agility and streamline operations and achieve unmatched efficiencies, such as:

• Increased operational efficiency - Orchestration improves efficiency by 20-30% through automated routine tasks and reduced manual work according to analysts.
• Enhanced agility - Gartner finds organizations adapt 30% faster to changes with orchestrated workflows for resiliency across markets.
• Superior customer experience - Forrester notes a 20-25% increase in satisfaction as requests are handled seamlessly and personalized at scale.
• Accelerated innovation - IDC reports a 35% reduced time-to-market by optimizing cross-functional processes for faster delivery.
• Cost savings and scalability - Studies show a 25-30% decrease in expenses and robust frameworks to expand operations cost-effectively.
• Actionable insights - Collecting and analyzing data from orchestrated systems provides strategic guidance and performance enhancements.
• Valuable competitive edge - Streamlined, data-driven processes establish a new standard for efficiency, customer-focus, and optimized transformation.
• Streamlined operations with automated workflows.
• Comprehensive visibility across the IT landscape.
• Standardized, consistent processes.
• Cost and resource optimization.
• Quicker time-to-market by aligning cross-functional teams.

Ultimately, enterprise orchestration translates operational improvements into sustainable growth and market leadership by empowering insight-based decisions, resilience, responsiveness, and consistent execution across evolving business needs.

What does orchestration mean in software?

At its core, software orchestration is the strategic automation of intricate, multi-stage software delivery and deployment processes. It spans across diverse software components, server environments, and teams, ensuring a harmonized flow of operations. The primary objective is to synchronize software flows, manage dependencies, and facilitate interactions to achieve peak performance.

What are some examples of orchestration?

Examples of orchestration include:

• CI/CD Pipelines: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines exemplify orchestration, automating the build and deploy processes seamlessly.
• Infrastructure-as-Code Tools: These tools allow infrastructure to be provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control.
• Container Orchestrators: Tools like Kubernetes fall under this category, managing the lifecycle of containers.
• Workflow Managers & AIOps Workflows: These tools and workflows ensure smooth operations by automating and coordinating tasks.

Is Kubernetes an orchestration tool?

Kubernetes stands out in the orchestration landscape. Why? It adeptly manages the behaviors of containerized applications during runtime. From automating network configurations to scaling operations and ensuring system resilience, Kubernetes embodies the essence of orchestration.

What is difference between container and orchestration?

Containers package application code and dependencies while orchestration manages the interactions and lifecycles of containers by automating deployment, health checks, scaling etc.

Some common orchestration platforms are Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, Apache Aurora, Marathon etc. They automate deployment, management and scaling of containerized applications.

Scheduling is coordinating the assignment of tasks to resources like CPUs whereas orchestration involves higher level orchestration by automating dependencies, failure recovery etc beyond simple scheduling of workloads.

What is the difference between scheduling and orchestration?

While scheduling is about assigning tasks to resources (like CPUs), orchestration elevates this concept. It goes beyond mere task allocation, automating dependencies, ensuring system resilience, and more. Think of scheduling as the basic step, and orchestration as the advanced maneuver.

Automation and Orchestration: Two sides of the same coin?

Automation and orchestration, though closely related, have distinct roles:

• Automation: It's about scripting individual tasks, making repetitive processes efficient.
• Orchestration: This is the bigger picture. It harmonizes multiple automated tasks, ensuring they align with dependencies, events, and best practices. It offers a holistic view, ensuring workflows are optimized.

For instance, while the deployment of code can be automated, orchestrating an entire CI/CD pipeline, encompassing versioning, testing, and approvals, is a testament to orchestration.

What is the difference between DevOps orchestration and automation?

In the DevOps paradigm, orchestration plays a pivotal role. It ensures seamless coordination across various domains - be it development, testing, or security. While automation might focus on specific segments of the pipeline, DevOps orchestration bridges gaps, ensuring a continuous delivery mechanism.

For instance, Kubernetes' orchestration capabilities ensure container dependencies are automated, and tasks like self-healing and autoscaling are managed across clusters, optimizing containerized application deployments.

Orchestration in the DevOps Ecosystem

DevOps orchestration is about creating harmony in cross-functional workflows. It involves development, security, operations, and more. The goal is to set standards, manage dependencies, and dismantle silos. This ensures continuous delivery via automated pipelines and tools, with deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code tools being prime examples.

What is orchestration in DevOps?

DevOps orchestration automates and coordinates cross-functional workflows involving development, security, operations etc. It establishes standards and dependencies to break down silos and enable continuous delivery through automated pipelines and toolchains. Popular examples include deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code tools.

Containerization and orchestration tools lower infrastructure barriers. Yet complex dependencies remain between continuously evolving components. Orchestration acts as the invisible force automating coordination at each step for optimized software delivery. This maintains performance as architectures scale.

Final thoughts

Looking ahead, continual evolution will be required to maintain performance as architectures scale. Automation is the future, but orchestration acts as the strategic force synchronizing elements cohesively. Platforms like Kubeark simplify intensely dynamic landscapes, readying enterprises for what's next.

This article explored the evolving landscape of enterprise orchestration, drawing insights from leading analysts at McKinsey, Gartner, Forrester and others. As discussed, enterprise orchestration has emerged as a strategic, holistic, and integrated approach for streamlining complex workflows across technologies.

Its transformative benefits offer a clear path forward - streamlining operations, enhancing productivity and driving sustainable innovation through this indispensable paradigm.

Discover how leading companies are leveraging Kubeark to accelerate innovation, optimize costs and deliver continuous value through holistic orchestration across their software delivery, infrastructure management and business processes. To learn more about how Kubeark's integrated enterprise orchestration capabilities can help your organization successfully navigate today's complex IT landscapes, book a demo of the Kubeark platform.