An orchestrator refers to a software system programmed with workflow rules and business logic that facilitates automated actions and integrated connectors to external software systems. Many IT organizations create scripts to automate manual tasks; however, these are now considered a legacy technique. Scripts are also difficult to maintain and reuse, and their sequential processing limits their flexibility.
An orchestration system goes well beyond scripting with parallel tasking, branching workflows, situational-awareness logic, and the ability to back out from or resume workflows that fail or sense an error. You can integrate Scripts and other automated software installation packaging tools into an orchestration workflow; however, the orchestration should always be the primary logic engine at the core of all cloud provisioning and automation workflows.
A key point from the above is that the hypervisor software itself is not the same as the cloud management platform. In this example, hypervisors perform only the creation and management of VMs. Note that some hypervisor software platforms can perform some higher-level cloud management functions but are usually not as complete and all-encompassing as a full cloud management platform. It is the cloud management system that performs everything from taking the customer’s order from a service catalogue to the approval process; to triggering the hypervisor to provision services; updating the network management systems with the new VM configuration and status; starting utilization and invoice tracking, and finally, sending email to the end user and cloud support staff of success.
Key Take-Away
The earliest cloud systems often relied solely on the hypervisor software’s portal or configuration tools. These hypervisor configuration portals are good for technical personnel to manage basic VM services for a single tenant organization. Multitenant clouds with more advanced PaaS and Software as a Service SaaS applications utilize full cloud management platforms that automate and orchestrate the entire infrastructure and customer portals—the hypervisor software is now just an underlying component of the cloud management system.
The figure below shows a diagram published by NIST that maps service orchestration to the NIST Cloud Reference model.
NIST model for cloud service orchestration (Source: NIST, Special Publication 5-500-291 version 2, July 2013)
There are three common methods for provisioning resources in a cloud infrastructure. Clearly, automatic is the preferred method, but there are scenarios in which you would use the other methods, as well.
Benefits:
Disadvantages:
Benefits:
Disadvantages:
Benefits:
Disadvantages:
One key feature of orchestration and provisioning is resource allocation. In this process, the cloud system takes a new order from a customer and determines which servers, storage systems, and subnetworks have available capacity to host this new customer’s request for a compute or software instance. As each server and server farm fills up, the system knows to automatically move to the next pool of servers to provision new services (e.g., virtual machines).
If there are no avail- able resources, a warning message is generated to the cloud provider’s support staff. When additional space is available, the orchestrator will again attempt to provision the new service. All of this is done without human intervention, and potentially hundreds of times each day as new customers order services and existing customers begin to utilize more disk space and VMs.
The opposite of automated provisioning is the de-provisioning of services for customers that cancel, or that the support personnel instruct the cloud management system to destroy. The management system knows how to stop VMs, delete user accounts, reclaim disk storage, application licenses, and cease billing for the terminated services. When any customer’s subscription is terminated, all of the server, VM, processor, memory, storage, and other resources are cleared, reclaimed, and made available for the next customer.
There are some hypervisors and storage systems that do not automatically reclaim the now-unused disk space because of technical limitations in the manufacturer’s software. This is similar to moving files to your deleted items or trash can on a desktop computer, but the disk space is still being occupied by the deleted data until you clear the trash can; the disk space is not truly reclaimed or made available for the next customer.
Key Take-Away
The reclamation process, both within a hypervisor and especially storage systems, are not always automatic (various limitations of some software manufacturers). This requires the creation of batch processes scheduled to run daily, weekly, or monthly during nonpeak hours to actually clear services or data that is no longer active.
As the orchestration system is essentially the brains of the cloud management system, it is also the place where any custom business logic and customized workflows are created. The cloud service provider can use the orchestrator to provision simple or multitiered cloud applications, send messages, send out customer invoices, and automatically trigger an alert for any event within the cloud. As future “as a service” products are deployed, the orchestrator is updated with new workflows, scripts, processes, and rules that facilitate automated provisioning, utilization tracking, billing and metering, and operational management.
Many cloud management platforms include a service designer tool (through programming and/or a GUI interface) with which the cloud provider or technically skilled customer can create new workflows, single or multiple VM platform applications, network segmentation etc.
Often, in a private cloud deployment model, the orchestrator can be used to handle highly customized customer needs. These custom tasks could be to per- form multiple-level order approval, approver reminders after a period of time has passed, or customer notification of certain events. You can also program the orchestrator to do non-cloud-specific tasks such as opening a support ticket, gathering statistical data and sending a monthly report, or warning the cloud provider’s support personnel well in advance before they run out of available disk storage.
Key Take-Away
Some orchestration systems include a library of pre-integrated service designs and connectors to external software systems, hypervisors, network management tools, and additional cloud providers in a hybrid cloud environment.
==END
