Orchestration is the automated configuration, management, and coordination of computer systems, applications, and services. Orchestration helps IT to more easily manage complex tasks and workflows.
IT teams must manage many servers and applications, but doing so manually isn’t a scalable strategy. The more complex an IT system, the more complex managing all the moving parts can become. The need to combine multiple automated tasks and their configurations across groups of systems or machines increases. That’s where orchestration can help.
Automation and orchestration are different, but related concepts. Automation helps make your business more efficient by reducing or replacing human interaction with IT systems and instead using software to perform tasks to reduce cost, complexity, and errors.
In general, automation refers to automating a single task. This is different from orchestration, which is how you can automate a process or workflow that involves many steps across multiple disparate systems. When you start by building automation into your processes, you can then orchestrate them to run automatically.
IT orchestration also helps you to streamline and optimize frequently occurring processes and workflows, which can support a DevOps approach and help your team deploy applications more quickly. You can use orchestration to improve the efficiency of IT processes such as server provisioning, incident management, cloud orchestration, database management, application orchestration, and many other tasks and workflows.