A few days ago my first guest blogger blog post was released at the VMTurbo About : Virtualization web page and i touched the area of orchestration. For those of you following my blog, you know that i typically write about stuff i’m working on and a few software release notes so this is a coplmete new area for me.
This is a short section of the blog post.
The purpose of creating an automated task is to get rid of a manual task and the same time making sure it’s getting done exactly the way we want.
Automation from my perspective is when you have a solution for a repeatable task. Let’s say you need to create 100 new virtual machines (VMs). You create a process backed by some sort of script that takes care of the task with just a minimum number of input parameters and most importantly, is repeatable.
Orchestration from my perspective is when you combine automated tasks into one single workflow. There are tons of examples when this is needed and one is a self-service portal where you give the consumers the power of standing up and decommission systems without interacting with e.g. service provider or internal system administrators/delivery teams.
If you find this area interesting i suggest you read the entire blog post here and you’ll have an example of what orchestration can do for a service provider.