Automation vs. Orchestration

What is automation?

Automation is a big topic for companies, no matter the industry. Whether your job is in IT or another business area, you’re likely hearing about automating as a way of saving money, improving efficiencies, and removing inherent errors.
Automation is setting up a single task or function to run on its own—automating one task without human intervention. Instead of a staff member performing a task by hand, a computer can follow a script and reliably perform a task quickly and as many times as necessary. executed wisely, automation makes traditionally time-intensive, manual processes more efficient and reliable.
In IT, it’s possible to automate a wide range of processes and tasks, from app deployment and integration, to securing endpoints and creating service tickets, for both on-premise and cloud tasks. In cloud automation, for instance, you might use automation tools and machine learning to dynamically deploy assets to the cloud, manage cloud computing workloads or classify terabytes of images. Automation is a broad term encompassing physical robots, software robots, and Business Process Automation, where applications are created that digitize operations and intelligently integrate your enterprise systems. In automation, the sysadmin has already made all task-related decisions. A computer only executes a "recipe" of instructions and fulfills a single goal. Automation makes time-intensive processes more efficient and reliable. 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

to the cloud, manage cloud computing workloads or classify terabytes of images. Automation is a broad term encompassing physical robots, software robots, and Business Process Automation, where applications are created that digitize operations and intelligently integrate your enterprise systems. In automation, the sysadmin has already made all task-related decisions. A computer only executes a "recipe" of instructions and fulfills a single goal. Automation makes time-intensive processes more efficient and reliable. 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. Automation makes time-intensive processes more efficient and reliable. A business can automate various repetitive tasks both on-premises and in the cloud, including:

• Provisioning a virtual server when there is a spike in traffic or usage.
• Transferring customer data from a CRM.
• Launching a web or app server.
• Sending a PDF to a customer after a user submits an online form.
• Integrating a software API.
• Deploying security measures on an endpoint if an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) discovers a threat.
• Sending info to a third-party app (e.g., a ticketing system).
• Changing a line of code in all JSON or YAML files.
• Sending an automatic email based on different stages of a marketing funnel.
• Adding a record to a database at the start of a batch job.

if your team has the necessary know-how, you can automate any IT process you want. While setting up software and deployment automation is a common decision, companies typically invest the most time and effort into infrastructure and cloud automation.

What is Orchestration?

Orchestration is the coordination and management of multiple computer systems, applications and/or services, stringing together multiple tasks in order to execute a larger workflow or process. These processes can consist of multiple tasks that are automated and can involve multiple systems.
The goal of orchestration is to streamline and optimize the execution of frequent, repeatable processes and thus to help data teams more easily manage complex tasks and workflows. Anytime a process is repeatable, and its tasks can be automated, orchestration can be used to save time, increase efficiency, and eliminate redundancies. For example, you can simplify data and machine learning with jobs 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:

• Knowing and understanding the many steps involved.
• 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
• Technologies.
• Apps.
• Datasets.

What is application orchestration?

Application orchestration is when you integrate two or more software applications together. You might do this in order to automate a process, or to enable real-time syncing of data. Most software development efforts need some kind of application orchestration—without it, you’ll find it much harder to scale application development, data analytics, machine learning and AI projects.
The process allows you to manage and monitor your integrations centrally, and add capabilities for message routing, security, transformation and reliability. This approach is more effective than point-to-point integration, because the integration logic is decoupled from the applications themselves and is managed in a container instead.

What is service orchestration?

Service orchestration works in a similar way to application orchestration, in that it allows you to coordinate and manage systems across multiple cloud vendors and domains—which is essential in today’s world. The approach covers microservice orchestration, network orchestration and workflow orchestration.
Individual services don’t have the native capacity to integrate with one another, and they all have their own dependencies and demands. The more complex the system, the more important it is to orchestrate the various components. That way, you can scale infrastructures as needed, optimize systems for business objectives and avoid service delivery failures.

What is container orchestration?

Container orchestration automates the scheduling, deployment, networking, scaling, health monitoring, and management of containers. Containers are complete applications; each one packaging the necessary application code, libraries, dependencies, and system tools to run on a variety of platforms and infrastructure. Containers in some form have been around since the late 1970’s, but the tools used to create, manage, and secure them have dramatically changed.
We have come a long way from the days of building single-tier monolithic applications that only worked on a single platform. Today, developers have choices between microservices, containers, and virtual machines, all with options for different cloud providers or hybrid deployments including on-premises.
Container orchestration is the automation of container management and coordination. Software teams use the best container orchestration tools to control and automate tasks such as provisioning and deployments of containers, allocation of resources between containers, health monitoring of containers, and securing interactions between containers. Software orchestration teams typically use container orchestration tools like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. You start by describing your app’s configuration in a file, which tells the tool where to gather container images and how to network between containers.
The tool also schedules deployment of containers into clusters and finds the most appropriate host based on pre-set constraints such as labels or metadata. It then manages the container’s lifecycle based on the specifications laid out in the file.
automating container orchestration enables you to scale applications with a single command, quickly create new containerized applications to handle growing traffic, and simplify the installation process. It also improves security.

What is cloud orchestration?

Cloud orchestration is the process of automating the tasks that manage connections on private and public clouds. It also integrates automated tasks and processes into a workflow to help you perform specific business functions.
The rise of cloud computing, involving public, private and hybrid clouds, has led to increasing complexity. This creates a need for cloud orchestration software that can manage and deploy multiple dependencies across multiple clouds. Cloud service orchestration includes tasks such as provisioning server workloads and storage capacity and orchestrating services, workloads and resources.
Remember that cloud orchestration and automation are different things: Cloud orchestration focuses on the entirety of IT processes, while automation focuses on an individual piece. Orchestration simplifies automation across a multi-cloud environment, while ensuring that policies and security protocols are maintained.

What is security orchestration?

Security orchestration is the process of integrating a disparate ecosystem of SOC tools and processes to automate tasks for simpler, more effective security operations.
Security operations teams typically have dozens of cybersecurity security tools in place to prevent, detect and remediate threats. But if these technologies and resources aren’t fully integrated into a unified ecosystem, the results are inefficiencies, heightened security risks and lower employee morale.
Security orchestration solves these problems by creating harmony between processes and technologies, so that most day-to-day SOC tasks can be completed in a single console.
Security orchestration ensures your automated security tools can work together effectively, and streamlines the way they’re used by security teams. The aim is that the tools can communicate with each other and share data—thus reducing the potential for human error, allowing teams to respond better to threats, and saving time and cost.
What is Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) The acronym describes three software capabilities as defined by Gartner:

• Orchestration—Threat and vulnerability management.
• Automation—Security operations automation.
• Response­—Security incident response.

This approach combines automation and orchestration, and allows organizations to automate threat-hunting, the collection of threat intelligence and incident responses to lower-level threats

What is DevOps orchestration?

DevOps is the set of practices that combines software development and IT operations in order to reduce software development lifecycle (SDLC). Orchestration tools enhance DevOps lifecycles by:

• Automating IT processes relevant to DevOps, such as machine provisioning, system reboots, or task scheduling.
• Auto reporting of process errors, fails, and interruptions.
• Creating a product backlog and revision history for audit and compliance.

DevOps orchestration is the automation of numerous processes that run concurrently in order to reduce production issues and time to market.
Many people believe that DevOps orchestration is just merging several jobs into a larger script, but it is much more than that. DevOps orchestration services include such jobs into a process or workflow, which may involve many automated tasks and stages, and resources to streamline the entire workflow or process.

The difference between automation and orchestration

Despite the terms automation and orchestration often being used interchangeably, automation is a subset of orchestration. Automation has been widely adopted by many organizations in a bid to reduce costs, increase efficiency and maximize business output and it is not without success.
However, when automating multiple business processes of varying complexity at scale, it is orchestration that provides the visibility and control needed to achieve digital efficiency across the enterprise – connecting businesses across teams, locations, and time-zones. Orchestration is more complex than automation. It coordinates tasks, integrates systems, makes decisions based on outputs, and adapts to changing conditions. The goal of orchestration is to provide an overall view of automation technologies across the enterprise including low-code, RPA, AI, and legacy systems. Often, automation is a term that may be used only partially correctly. The term orchestration, by contrast, is used less outside technical areas, but it’s more often what we mean when we talk about automation. Whichever term, automation and orchestration are both essential to successful digital transformation.

Resources:

• https://blogs.bmc.com/it-orchestration-vs-automation-whats-the-difference?print-posts=print
• https://www.bmc.com/blogs/it-orchestration-vs-automation-whats-the-difference/
• https://www.infinitylabs.in/it-automation-orchestration-key-to-successful-digital-transformation/
• https://www.burwood.com/blog-archive/automation-vs-orchestration-whats-the-difference
• https://www.databricks.com/glossary/orchestration
• https://phoenixnap.com/blog/orchestration-vs-automation
• https://www.databricks.com/glossary/orchestration