Is your DevOps toolchain inflexible and costing you more in engineering efforts than it should? If you've been relying on automation alone, then the answer is likely yes.
Automation may be useful for deployment, but it is a rigid solution that fails to meet the needs of modern application orchestration and management.
Most of the DevOps tools available today have been created with a focus on the develop-build-test portion of the overall process, with the operations side taking longer to gain traction. This unbalanced approach has left many organisations with automation tools that are inflexible and hard to change. While automation can save time and reduce errors, it lacks the adaptability and responsiveness required to meet the complex challenges of modern cloud and application management.
Whilst technical teams are dealing with these cumbersome approaches, the needs of the business continue to evolve rapidly. Regulation is increasing, business velocity is relentless, and cloud-native challengers are springing up. This leads to real friction in management teams, and significant toil for DevOps engineers.
In contrast, orchestration is a more flexible approach that allows for greater adaptability and responsiveness to changing situations. With orchestration tools, workflows and templates are used to define and execute complex processes, providing fine-grained control over the application environment. Unlike automation, orchestration is policy-based and can automatically respond to application incidents, platform outages, or new business constraints.
We have learnt that:
- Automation is a high-code approach, reliant on complex scripts that are tightly coupled to specific cloud interfaces. During the early DevOps years, automation was invaluable to get applications integrated and deployed. However as the range of cloud services has exploded, and microservice adoption has become widespread, script complexity has grown exponentially - leaving a huge technical debt.
- Orchestration tools spring up to deal with the complexity, providing abstraction layers that make it easier to perform common deployment sequences, and providing the flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements.
Ori Global Cloud provides intelligent orchestration that provisions platforms, deploys applications, and configures network and security settings, saving customers time, stress, and governance headaches when managing multiple development, test, and production environments potentially across several cloud providers. Our platform allows organizations to gain flexibility and control over their containerized application deployments.
By abstracting the configuration of deployments in simple terms, the skills required to create complex solutions drop to near-zero. With adaptability at the core, applications can be rapidly replanned and redeployed without the bottleneck of detailed system administration work. One orchestration solution can handle both development/test systems and be trusted to manage full-scale production builds maintaining consistency of process and reliability and scalability of user-facing solutions.
It's time to move beyond rigid automation and embrace the power of intelligent orchestration.
