Understanding Cloud Orchestration and Automation: Key Differences Explained

[johny899]

Have you ever come across the concepts of cloud automation and cloud orchestration and thought they were the same thing? You’re not the only one! They sound similar but they perform very different roles. Let’s break it down so that it’s easy to understand.

What Is Cloud Automation?​

If you think about cloud automation as doing something without you having to think about it, you might compare it to programming a coffee maker to make you coffee every morning at 7 AM. You programmed it and now you're letting it do the work for you, over and over again.

Automation in the cloud means using scripts or automated tools to perform basic, repetitively, simple tasks such as:

• Starting and stopping servers
• Backing up data
• Installing updates or apps

It’s like pushing the “auto” button on your car. Super quick, easy, and reliable for one task. Cloud automation only performs individual tasks, not the entire process.

What Is Cloud Orchestration?​

Now, think about being in a music band. Every musician in the band can play their part. But, without a conductor, it’s completely disorganized. The conductor makes sure everyone plays exactly on cue, ultimately making the process work in unison. That’s essentially what cloud orchestration does.

Cloud orchestration is the linking and managing of many automated processes so they efficiently occur in the appropriate order. For example:

• First it boots the servers
• Then it configures the networking
• Then it provisions the storage
• Finally, it deploys the application.

In summary, automation does tasks, while orchestration orchestrates them to work together.

Why Is Both of Them Important​

Both of them are important because you cannot have orchestration without automation. Automation builds the components, and orchestration links them together. With automation and orchestration, the cloud will utilize resources in a much smarter and efficient manner.

If you are managing multiple servers or cloud applications, orchestration is your project manager. For simple workloads or schedulers, automation will be sufficient.