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Make Your IT Automation Systems Play Together Like a Symphony
Cloud Orchestration with Chef
Special Thanks: This article was made possible by support from Linux Professional Institute
About a month ago, I was talking with a few cloud professionals at an IT conference in London. One of the topics was about ways to eliminate repetitive tasks. Naturally, we started talking about automation and orchestration. It was kind of fun to step back a bit and watch each of these folks test each other’s knowledge about the difference between automation and orchestration. It was even more fun to hear them talk about their favorite solutions for each.
Orchestration and Automation
The general consensus in my impromptu little automation and orchestration panel was that automation allowed workers to easily replicate and repeat traditional IT tasks, usually using cloud-based services. The folks I talked with then went on to talk about how orchestration is a related task, because orchestration allows workers to arrange, sequence, and coordinate automated tasks. I’ve always seen automation and orchestration in musical terms: Automation allows you to replicate a string section, a woodwind section, as well as the percussionists. Orchestration sets up a conductor to get all of these sections to work together to perform a symphony.
Automation is where you take a traditional task and use software to do all of the grunt work. Automation is useful across the board, but here are three common uses in the cloud:
- Scaling systems from customer requests: Automating the process of provisioning virtualized servers so that they meet the needs of clients. This means automating a server instance so it can contain the features needed by the customer.
- Data backup: Few people enjoy implementing all of the minutiae of backup. So, why
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