There are many tools which can be used for different scenarios: tools for container management, infrastructure management, container orchestration and network orchestration. You need the right toolkit to really make your application sing – and we can help you select the best tools for your application.
Orchestration is the automation (deployment, reconfiguration and tear down) of infrastructure, applications, platforms and services. But it is also so much more than that. The focus goes beyond deployment and configuration. Includes full lifecycle management: monitoring, alarming, automatic operational feedback loops: automatic healing, scaling and more. Goes beyond what public cloud provides by incorporating input from physical, virtual infrastructure as well as input from as far up the app stack as you want to go. We manage orchestration in the same manner as our other services – completely tailored to your requirements.
Orchestration is important for any modern business. It allows the user to coordinate all elements of their technology infrastructure to delivery sophisticated services to their customers. By implementing orchestration, we can remove mundane tasks such as reproducing the same procedures over and over again, as well as simplifying complex procedures such as environment cloning. This reduces cost, improves speed and agility, is easier to maintain and allows sophisticated new services to be created from diverse assets, such as networks, application and infrastructure.
Network Automation and Orchestration using platforms such as the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), addresses many networking concerns relating to scalability, resources and complexity, providing users with the ability to create, design and deploy network services in a fully automated manner. New services can be deployed on demand, allowing users to gain users gain greater control of both physical and virtual network elements with lower operational costs. In addition to increased network resilience, vendor lock-in is reduced, allowing interoperation and control of network devices from a range of vendors, saving both time and money.
Due to the rapidly expanding technical requirements for businesses today, we have seen many organisations using more than one Cloud to run their workloads. Organisations are also running workloads in a hybrid scenario by consuming both private and public Clouds to meet their needs.
Orchestrations can control apps and services across multiple Cloud providers. A user can create a multi-site application in multiple sites, multiple providers and control application and cloud infrastructure lifecycle from a single orchestration interface.
Orchestrations can provision resources, such as compute, network and storage, in different clouds
Infrastructure provisioning can be automated using either the native tools provided by public clouds or third-party tools such as Terraform. Which to use will depend on your project requirements and technical capability, though using cloud-agnostic tools allows you to describe your entire multi-cloud infrastructure in a single language.
Container orchestration platforms have provided users with greater flexibility when running applications on both virtual infrastructure and physical hardware. They are also extremely lightweight and efficient, meaning your services can easily be packed up, moved between environments and switched between testing and production.
Container orchestration engines can be combined with service orchestration to provide containerised applications in a broader infra/network/app solution. This enables better utilisation of available hardware resources, higher development speed and higher fault tolerance against network function, virtual machine, or hardware failure.
We particularly like Kubernetes – Kubernetes is specifically designed for deploying and managing containerised applications at scale across all major public clouds and private infrastructure, enabling users to operate their own Kubernetes clusters on demand. Our Solutionauts are Certified Kubernetes Administrators (CKA), and Aptira has real-world experience creating, configuring and managing several Kubernetes clusters in production environments.
Aptira and Cloudify have been partnering to deliver solutions for open infrastructure, SDN, NFV and ONAP for leading Telcos & Enterprises in the region.
Cloudify is an orchestration engine that is entirely pluggable. It can control any app, infrastructure, cloud IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or COE that provides an API or machine readable interface. Cloudify is used model based orchestration: the human designer decides what is needed and Cloudify automates the deployment of the design onto/into the infrastructure/cloud. They also support lots of stuff out of the box, and support the TOSCA model. TOSCA is the Topology Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications. Simply put, TOSCA offers a standardized way to describe applications as well as its dependencies and supporting cloud infrastructure. With this method of modeling applications, TOSCA enables users to deploy and orchestrate the lifecycle of applications across multiple clouds (and other environments).
Aptira has been delivering multi-cloud solutions based on Cloudify’s orchestration platform, including deep expertise around OpenStack and open networking projects, being a joint-member with Cloudify in the Linux Foundation Networking project, along with a community leader around OpenStack in their territory.
There are many tools which can be used for different scenarios. We can help you select the best toolkit to maximise performance for your application.
Configuration Management Tools
IT automation tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet and SaltStack simplify manual processes. These tools are great for automating services and configurations and have good solid modules for infrastructure management.
Infrastructure Orchestration Tools
Infrastrucrure Orchestration programs such as HEAT, GCP or AWS CloudFormation are native to your Cloud provider. They are great for rolling out infrastructure components, but often have limited workflow, logging and monitoring solutions.
Container Orchestration Tools
Kubernetes, Docker Swarm have revolutionised the way software is packaged. Docker Swarm is generally easy to setup up, but has a low fault tolerance and is less extensive and customisable compared to Kubernetes. Kubernetes has a larger learning curve and involves a heavier setup.
For a full list of our supported technologies, check out this page and chat with our Solutionaut to find out which Orchestration tools will work best for your requirements.
